An update to my October 13, 2025 blog post about the Claude AI system summarizing the transcript of a video I really liked.

I’ve been thinking about the 30 Habits video I shared earlier this month a lot. Maybe too much.

First of all, I really do like the 30 “habits” listed in the video. Maybe not all of them, but most of them. I really think they are good things to make part of your life. (If you haven’t watched the video and are looking for little things to make your life better, please take less than 20 minutes of your day and watch it.)

I decided that in order to make them part of my life I needed to be reminded of them. The idea was to make myself a little cheat sheet that I could put in my daily planner and look at once in a while. No one can expect me (or anyone else) to remember all 30 things on the list.

So I went back to the Claude summary and used it as the basis for my cheat sheet. The initial design would be bullet points. But I quickly realized that for some of the items, a bullet point would not be enough. For example, what does “small trust deposits” mean? Clearly, I needed more info on my cheat sheet.

I changed the design to a folding insert with the bullet list on the cover and the details inside and finishing up on the back. And rather than rewrite the summary myself, I just copied and pasted the Claude AI summary. I edited it a bit for length and clarity — honestly, it didn’t need much in the way of changes — and applied a font size that would make it fit while retaining legibility. After a little formatting, it was finished. I printed it, laminated it, and inserted it into my Traveler’s Notebook style planner. (The planner, by the way, has gotten yet another upgrade since Part 3 of that series and I may blog about it briefly.)

This is exactly what I needed to keep these 30 Habits front and center — or at least within arm’s reach — in my life.

This has changed my view of AI — at least a little. Clearly MDY’s use of Claude has a lot of merit — maybe even more than I originally admitted. (I have since messaged her on Mastodon and told her this.) While she used it to summarize the video’s transcript and used the summary as a decision-making tool for watching it, I can see it as a way to summarize something I’ve already watched that means a lot to me. Yes, I’m talking about letting it take notes for me.

I’m wondering if it always does such a good job or if this was a fluke. I’m also wondering whether Claude is better at it than its competitors.

But I’m not wondering enough to actually try it for myself. At least not yet. I don’t want to support AI and I believe that using it is supporting it. I really do want to think for myself, to keep my own summarization skills. And I sincerely hope that folks who have not built those skills yet try to do so without leaning on AI.

And there’s another 500 words for you. ;-)

I share my less than satisfactory experiences becoming a certified powerboat handling instructor.

I got my OUPV or “six pack” Captains License from the USCG back in 2023. It required me to take a 7-day class, pass four tests, and document 360 days under way on the water. (A day, in case you’re wondering, is at least 4 hours; two 3-hour days does not equal one day and one 9-hour day does not equal two days.)

I think the experience requirement is excellent, although 360 days is quite a bit of time. If you’ve spent 360 days under way on a boat and have been given any responsibilities other than tossing lines to someone on a dock, you probably have what it takes to captain a boat. Or at least that’s the logic behind the requirement.

As a USCG-licensed boat captain, I can do two things that someone without the license can’t legally do:

• I can take up to 6 paying passengers on my boat, thus earning a little income should I decide I want to offer fishing charters or tours.
• I can provide boat training to paying students.

In other words, I can use my skills, knowledge, and boat to make a little money. My fourth career? (Or fifth? I’m loosing count.) Maybe.

First Gigs

I did my first two training gigs in May 2024 when I was in the Annapolis area on the Great Loop.

The first student was a brand new boater who had purchased a 2015 Ranger Tug R-29 that he planned to take solo on the Great Loop starting in June. He was so new to boating that he was afraid to drive the boat out of its slip — and it was facing out! We worked together for three days and he got better every day. While I would not have signed him off to take my boat out on a charter, he was definitely on his way to becoming a good enough skipper to do the Loop. (His departure was delayed for a while, but he did get started. I’m not sure if he finished; I think some mechanical problems may have stalled him along the way.)

The other students were a couple who bought a newer Ranger Tug R-29. Their experience was in pontoon (or patio, as I call them) boats. This was a big step up. I spent a day with them. The husband was fine but the wife was full of fears that she did not hesitate to vocalize. She had no interest in getting behind the wheel, and that was okay with me. They only had me for a day and time was limited. I was able to get them up to speed on Ranger Tug systems and practice maneuvers that they already knew from previous experience.

Fast Forward to September 2024

I finished the Loop in August 2024 and had the boat back in the Seattle area by September. I had minimal experience cruising in the San Juan Islands and when I saw a two-week flotilla up to Desolation Sound offered by San Juan Yachting (SJY), I called to see if I could join in on my own boat. That’s how I wound up cruising with five larger boats as far up the Inside Passage as the Octopus Islands and back.

I was cruising solo, as I usually do. (While it’s nice to have company on board, it’s hard to find someone willing to split the costs and sleep in the midship berth, affectionally referred to as the Cave.) Every time I followed the other boats into a marina to tie up, the wife of the flotilla leader team would hurry over to my boat to help me tie up. In most cases, this was totally unnecessary; I dock without assistance all the time. Sometimes, by the time she got to my boat, I was already tied up. I think this impressed the flotilla leader because one day, as I was shutting down the engine and chartplotters, he came to my window and asked if I’d ever considered teaching people how to drive boats.

And that’s what started my longer term relationship with SJY.

A Little More about SJY

I need to say right up front that SJY is an excellent organization, extremely professional and focused on providing its charter and training clients the absolute best service they can. Simply said, if you want to charter a boat in the San Juan Islands, look at what SJY has to offer first. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. (And that’s not just because my boat is part of their fleet.)

As for training, they offer an excellent “Learn ‘n’ Cruise” course which puts you on a boat with two or more other people for a learning cruise in the San Juan Islands. This, I discovered, was what I would teach. (I actually taught two classes this spring — one single engine class for three people and one twin engine class for four people. All the students had a great time and I know they learned a lot.)

In all, I was really looking forward to the prospect of being an instructor for SJY. But first I had to get certified.

The Certification Process

SJY is the powerboat arm of San Juan Sailing (SJS), which has been around for a very long time. Some time ago, the powers that be at SJS decided that their training classes needed to be able to reward students with certifications. To do that, they had to get involved with an organization that had a certification process. They chose American Sailing (AS), which, like SJS, focused on sailing and sailing education. They would certify instructors and then the instructors who taught for SJS using AS materials could certify students.

When it came to the powerboat side of things, AS had a powerboat arm called the Recreational Powerboating Association (RPBA). As you might imagine, SJY chose that organization to certify its powerboat instructors and provide the materials for instructors to certify students.

To be certified as an instructor for single and twin engine powerboats, I had to attend two days of classes, each of which included some time on board a boat honing skills and practicing teaching each other how to handle the boat in close quarters. Fortunately, classes were coming up in October (this was still 2024) so I signed up. That’s when I got my first surprise: I had to foot the bill for the classes, which were $800+. Ouch. This was on top of the nearly 400-mile round trip drive from my home to Bellingham. I considered myself lucky that SJY allowed me to sleep on one of the charter boats for the two nights I was there or I would have been stuck with a $300 hotel bill, too.

I have no complaints about the classes. There were four students (if I recall) and we all had varying levels of experience. (My experience was mostly in small trawlers; I had zero twin engine time.) The material consisted of a boat handling book I already had (and can highly recommend) and a thin, black and white, spiral bound Student Underway Guide that discussed and illustrated maneuvers.

Classroom time was minimal, we all took and passed the written tests. We spent the afternoons on the boats, a single engine American Tug — the same one I’d been sleeping on — and a twin engine Grand Banks (if I recall correctly). I did fine on the instructor scoring criteria with the exception of not properly giving everyone on board a task while I was teaching the “student.” (I honestly didn’t know that was something I had to do. Oops.)

I went home the day after the second class. Some weeks later, I received three certificates in the mail:

• Classroom Powerboat Instructor
• CQPH Single Inboard Powerboat Instructor
• CQPH Twin Inboard Powerboat Instructor

I have no idea what CQPH stands for.

The certificates were white with gold foil trim and a gold embossed seal that had a blue ribbon. Very fancy. I punched holes in them and put them in my training binder. (You didn’t think I’d hang them on the wall, did you?)

As far as I — and SJY — was concerned, I would be ready to start teaching for the 2025 season.

Oh, and maybe you caught the fact that I was officially certified to teach twin-engine inboard power boats when I had less than 90 minutes of total time at the helm of one? That’s certification, for you. Pay the fee, take the class, pass the test, and you’re certified, no matter how much (or little) real life experience you have.

Changes in 2025

As I mentioned earlier, I taught two classes early in the 2025 season. The single engine class, given in a 47 foot LOA (that’s length overall) trawler, was tough given the windy weather and the fact that the largest boat I’d ever driven for any length of time was mine, with an LOA of just 32 feet. But we did well and I know my three students had a blast. The twin engine class went more smoothly — at least I thought it did. The boat was certainly easier to drive and the weather was better, too.

My first group of students and I, on this big single-engine boat, got along well, had fun learning, and still text to each other about new boating things in our lives. Building new friendships is a perk of teaching.

But sometime around then SJY contacted all the instructors to let them know that RPBA had reorganized into a brand new organization called American Boating (AB) that was still part of the AS organization. As part of the rebranding, they had developed textbooks that our students would have to buy (and so we’d have to buy and have on hand; mine cost $35) and needed to re-issue the certificates.

Alarm bells immediately went off in my head. Was I going to have to cough up another $800? But my fears were unfounded. Because we’d just gotten certificated, all we had to do was study the new material and take an online test for each certificate we needed to update.

I went online as instructed and saw just one option. I went through the video and took the test. I passed. I got a certificate for Power Boating Instructor. It was a much simpler affair on light blue cardstock with black and blue printing and a red and blue logo. No gold foil or ribbon.

The Confusion

Throughout the season, there was a lot of confusion at SJY. They kept referring to certification levels (by number) that I needed to have to teach intermediate and advanced classes. But I didn’t have the certificates and I didn’t see any way to get them.

Apparently, there was a glitch in AB’s system. I don’t know if it was just for me or for everyone — frankly, the whole organization (AB, not SJY) was in disarray, promising things that were never delivered. Finally, just last month, I got a new link and there were the two other tests. After coughing up another $50 for a fatter, advanced textbook full of photos, I took the test.

That’s when I discovered just how bad the book was. You see, it was an open-book test — or at least I assume it was since no one told me otherwise — and I made use of the absolutely horrific index to make sure I had the right answers to the questions. What I learned along the way is that the book was poorly organized, repetitious, and lacked the boat handling details we’d had in the Bob Sweet book. Sure, it was a pretty book with lots of photos of (mostly) Beneteau boats, but as a learning tool it was horrible.

I don’t make these judgements lightly. If you’ve been reading this blog long enough, you know that I wrote computer how-to books for a living for more than 20 years. I know how to organize information logically, presenting it in the order in which readers need to know it. It was obvious to me that the book was written by someone who had either never written a book or knew nothing about outlining, writing to an outline, and then editing a final book. This mess never would have gotten past any of my editors. They would have torn it apart and made me start from scratch. Honestly, until I communicated with two different people who claim to have worked on it, I thought it had been written by an AI. It is that bad.

To give you an idea of just how poorly written/organized the book was, I got a 94% and a 96% on open book tests. I should have gotten 100% on both of them. I have no idea which questions I got wrong, but one of them may have been the one about stowing food in a top-loading refrigerator. I have never been on a powerboat with a top-loading refrigerator — that’s a sailboat thing. This is content they must have pulled right out of their sailing textbook/test. And frankly, should I be wasting time teaching students how to stow their provisions? Isn’t it more important to teach them — and let them get practice — pulling the boat into a slip with a crosswind? Yet I don’t recall any questions about actual boating handling.

The Money Grab

About two weeks after taking the tests, I got a hard envelope in the mail from AB. Inside was a letter confirming I have all three certificates:

• Power Boating Instructor
• Intermediate Power Boating Instructor
• Advanced Power Boating Instructor

But the envelope only had the Advanced Power Boating Instructor certificate in it. The Intermediate Instructor certificate was missing.

The letter also referred to an instructor logbook that I’d never received. It included two plastic stickers that I assume I was supposed to stick into the logbook.

I emailed AB, telling them about the missing certificate and logbook.

I got a pretty quick response from the director of the organization. He told me that he’d get someone to look into the certificate. He also said I could get the logbook online and provided a link.

The link did not go to a printable PDF. It went to a $29 + tax + shipping softcover book. A book that I will not buy. (Hell, do you know how much my instructor briefcase already weighs?)

The next day, I got an email from someone at AS. She told me that they only send out the highest level certificate a person earns. If I want a copy of a certificate they hadn’t sent, I could order one from the website. That would cost me $22 including tax and shipping.

So yeah: they expected me to pay $22 for a piece of paper that they could easily have put into the envelope they sent with the Advanced certificate.

It was pretty clear to me that AB was going full money grab on its instructors and members.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that. I could become an AB member for $59 per year. As a member, I’d get:

• Savings on Courses & Certifications
  Members receive 25% off all American Boating courses, online classes, and certifications, so you can continue building your skills at a discounted rate.
• Online Access to Your Training Records
  Members can access their certification records 24/7 on our member portal. This is important when chartering or creating a boating resume.
• Exclusive Discounts on Gear and Apparel
  Enjoy significant savings on top-quality boating gear, apparel, and equipment from our trusted partners.
• Earlybird registration to live events
  Participate in webinars, special live seminars, and meet-ups, designed to connect you with other boating enthusiasts and industry experts.

In other words, I could spend $59 to save money when I spent more money on AB stuff. No thanks.

Oh, and I forgot to mention one very important thing: even though I’m an AB-certified instructor, I cannot certify my own students. I have to go through a training organization like SJY to do certifications. So these certificates have absolutely no value to me unless I want to train for a company that requires AB certification. Ain’t that a kick in the pants?

Me and My Big Fat Mouth

Of course, I couldn’t let this go. I was especially angry about the damn certificate. In my mind, it had cost me $800 and a 400-mile round trip drive, $35 for one book and $49 for the other, and the equivalent of four full days of my time (which is the most valuable thing I have these days). And now they wanted to squeeze another $22 out of me to get what I’d earned.

Screw that.

So I wrote to them about my dissatisfaction with the certificate situation and the books. I got a response from the director who seemed offended about the books, claiming “other people praise them” and telling me that he had been part of the team to write them. (Other people have lower standards than I do; I’m not impressed by stock photos sent by Beneteau, who may even have sponsored the books.) He asked me if I still want to teach their curriculum. I spent 45 minutes writing a detailed reply but — and this should impress you as much as it impresses me — I didn’t send it. Instead, I told him that he probably didn’t want to hear what I had to say and asked politely for my missing certificate to be mailed to me.

In the morning, I got an email message from the instructor who had taught the certification classes last year. He’s also an SJY instructor — a nice guy who really knows his stuff. He asked how things were going with my certificate update. I filled him in briefly on the missing certificate and my dissatisfaction with the books.

He wrote back to say that he was also involved in writing the books. That’s when I realized that AB had asked him to get more info from me.

So I gave him everything I’d written in the unsent message. I cc’d the director of training at SJY. I was getting it all off my chest publicly and, frankly, didn’t give a shit what came of it.

After sending that message, I emailed the director of training at SJY to explain myself and tell her that I probably wasn’t going to make myself available to teach in 2026. I also said that if I got her in hot water with AS or AB, she could tell them she fired me. I’m hoping she just leaves it at that.

My Future as a Boating Instructor

So I probably won’t teach any more for SJY. But I’ve already interviewed with another organization that doesn’t require certification and they can’t wait for me to start training for them — and possibly even acting as Captain on charter cruises — in the spring. And I have another instructor interview lined up on Monday.

Besides all that, I’ve done three training gigs on my own over the past three months. One was a 2-week boat delivery/training gig in Florida, one was a two-day “try my Ranger Tug” gig in Bellingham, and the other was a 5-day solo operations in a Ranger Tug training gig in Bellingham. Those three gigs paid more than the two I did for SJY. They were also a lot less stressful, since I didn’t have to teach arcane facts just because they would appear on a certification test. (I’m wondering if the refrigerator question is on the new tests.)

I jokingly refer to boat training as my fourth (or fifth) career. It’ll never be that. It’s just something I do to have fun on the water and share what I know with other boaters, while making a few bucks on the side. The requirements of teaching for certification take all the fun out of that.

I’m impressed by a 15-minute you tube video and surprised by how the Claude AI/LLM summarized it.

I’ll try to keep this short. Let’s see how I do.

As some people know, I often watch boring YouTube videos on my iPad in the middle of the night to help me sleep. The other morning — probably too late to get back to sleep anyway — this one was suggested to me. I tapped it and was soon pulled in by the concise way the creator presented 30 excellent tips in about 15 minutes.

If you’ve got 15 minutes to spare and think your life could use some improvement, I highly recommend watching this. (If you don’t think your life can use some improvement, you’re only fooling yourself; we can all improve.)

Now if you were expecting some talking head with a big microphone in front of his face and lots of letters after his/her name to read off a teleprompter while mostly unrelated stock footage appears randomly in the background, you will be disappointed. Or, in my case, pleased — I hate those kinds of videos.

This video has some simple graphics to look at while listening, but it doesn’t need to be seen. You can just listen. Or you can do what my Mastodon friend MDY did: feed the transcript to Claude AI and let it summarize it. She shared the link on Mastodon, too: https://claude.ai/public/ artifacts/d5ad56a1-46fe-47ab-9fc7-5f3958dd1b08.

I clicked the link and was immediately impressed (and a little surprised) by the well-organized summary that appeared. I was impressed because, on first glance (and subsequent analysis), it appears to be both accurate and correct — something I’m not accustomed to seeing with AI results. That’s why I was surprised.

Now I’m no fan of AI systems. Not only are they failing miserably most times they’re used to take a human out of a process, but they have huge environmental impacts, sucking power and water that is already costly to produce or downright stupid to waste. I have read more than my fair share of AI horror stories, from lawyers idiotically trusting them to write briefs (that clients are paying hundreds of dollars per hour for a legal processional to write) to programmers spending more time fixing AI-generated code than writing it from scratch.

But at the very top of my list of reasons to hate AI systems is the simple fact that they are being developed and promoted as a way to cut labor costs — yes, the primary purpose is to add to worldwide unemployment.

During our subsequent discussion on Mastodon, MDY made a good argument for using an AI like Claude to summarize video. She uses it to summarize content in seconds and then uses that summary to decide whether it’s worth watching the video (or one can assume, reading the article). I have to agree that if the content is long and the summary is concise, AI can save someone a lot of time, enabling them to focus on details in the content they find most valuable.

I do wonder how much time was saved in this example, though; the summary was more than 1600 words.

I also worry about people leaning on AI for tasks like this and losing the ability to create summaries for themselves. I compared an AI summary to the book reports we were required to write in school. What happens if we all just use AI for tasks like this and are then put into a position where we have to do it for ourselves?

I compare the potential loss of this skill to my own loss of spelling capabilities. I used to be a good speller. Really! But that skill is slipping away. I find myself more and more dependent on my computer or mobile device to flag or correct spelling on the fly. Sometimes, rather than look up or make an educated guess at the spelling of a word, I’ll type in something close and let my computer tell me the word I want. I’m not happy about this, but not motivated to turn off spelling check and tackle spelling on my own.

(For the record, I don’t and won’t use a grammar checker. For Pete’s sake, I am a writer. If I can’t get grammar and related style issues correct, I shouldn’t be writing at all.)

And has anyone ever considered the motivations of AI developers to get us addicted to using their systems for things we should be able to do on our own? Do you think the free systems will be free forever?

I guess my thoughts can be summarized as follows:

• This video (and yes, the AI summary) is chock full of useful tips that can make your life better. Seriously, if you haven’t watched it yet or read the summary, why the hell not?
• Yes, there are things an AI can do for you to make your life easier. But I still don’t think that includes creating original content that requires thought and creativity.
• AI should not be replacing people in jobs. Related: A person’s job should not be to check and correct “original” content created by AI.
• People should avoid technologies that do the thinking for them. “Use it or lose it” applies to your brain, too.

I don’t know about you, but I like to think for myself. While I can see the utility of the Claude summary MDY shared, I won’t be playing with AIs to summarize content for me any time soon. I’d rather do it the old fashioned way: by paying attention to what’s in front of me and, when appropriate, taking my own notes for future reference.

And look at that! I kept it under 1,000 words!

A blog post I felt I needed to write that is mostly already written for me.

Lately, my brain has been stewing over the situation faced by an acquaintance. Without going into too much detail or identifying him, I’ll just say a few things to set the backstory for this post.

My acquaintance — I’ll call him Joe — is recently retired in his early 60s. He’s married and his wife still works, but she is set to retire in spring. They’re financially secure, living in a nice home in a nice neighborhood. They have friends and family and are involved in a community organization they like.

Joe has some rather serious health issues and they are definitely slowing him down. But he also has a personal goal that means a lot to him. He started taking steps to achieve that goal, despite a total lack of support by his wife and family — in fact, they actively oppose him. In a way, I was part of the steps he took, providing assistance and training to the best of my ability in the circumstances. But when I recently followed up with him, he indicated that he was going to give up on this dream.

And that’s what I’m stewing over.

Be Amazing

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll know how I feel about life and making the most of it. Search through this blog — or just look at the handy list I’ve compiled for you at the end of this blog post — and you’ll find plenty of posts where I either implore readers to follow their own dreams or crow about how I’ve been following mine.

And yes, I know it isn’t easy sometimes. There are always obstacles. But we’ve all heard amazing stories about people beating the odds to achieve things no one thought were possible. Amputees running marathons. Blind folks flying airplanes. Cancer survivors climbing Mount Everest. Wow! Talk about obstacles! Yet these folks did it. It really puts the concept of challenges into perspective.

Rather than sitting back and saying “I can’t do this because…” these people went out and did it. They are amazing.

But you can be amazing, too.

So can Joe.

One Life

Every single one of us has just one life. It doesn’t matter what you believe happens to our souls (or whatever) when we die. There’s just one real life on earth for us to do the things we want to do. We can either surf (or struggle) through the days we have, letting life’s routines and the desire to please family, friends, and employers guide our very existence. Or we can chart our own paths though life, facing challenges and reaping rewards along the way.

Joe has health issues. That’s undeniable. They sap his energy — at least now. But are they really enough for him to abandon his dream? After all, achieving — or even getting started on the path to achieving — this goal might be one of the last things he does.

And what if his health issues disappear and he lives another 20 or 30 years? Will he always regret not chasing down his dream, especially when he was already on the path to doing so?

And shame on his wife and family for not supporting his desire to achieve this goal. Honestly, I think that’s what’s getting under my skin most of all.

That’s Enough

I don’t need to write any more about this. I already have. Here’s a list of related posts in this blog. This is not an AI-generated list. It’s a real list.

If you’re feeling unsatisfied with your life and want to get on a different path or achieve a specific goal, the posts in this list can help you get started.

• Stop Making Excuses. Make a Plan. February 23, 2025
  In which I attempt to encourage you to follow your dreams and try to tell you how.
• Thriving in Midlife September 15, 2016.
  Tired of my tips? Take some from the folks at NPR.
• Making it Happen. July 16, 2016
  You can do it if you try hard enough and stop making excuses.
• Turning Dreams into Realities January 15, 2015
  Reflecting on goals and achievements.
• On Luck November 23, 2013
  Does it even exist?
• Postponing Happiness November 3, 2013
  Could it be true?
• Atychiphobia July 16, 2013
  The fear of failure.
• Courage June 18, 2013
  I never thought I’d quote Oprah, but here it is.
• This guy gets it. Do you? July 13, 2013
  More fodder from my inbox.
• I Love My Life January 20, 2013
  Why I love my life — and how you can love your life, too.

Make it happen.

Some comments related to an excellent blog post about the ABC model of Rational-Emotive Therapy and being a writer.

One of the blogs I’ve included in my RSS feed reader is called Writer Unboxed. It presents anywhere from 5 to 10 blog posts related to writing each week. Some are extremely specific, such as a recent post about including blurbs with published books. Others are more general, such as the one I’m touching upon today, which discusses psychology.

If you’re serious about writing, whether for yourself or for publication and (hopefully) profit, this is a great blog to follow. I won’t say that I read every post in detail, because I don’t. But I find that many of the ones I do read give me lots of food for thought. I usually share my thoughts in a comment on the blog post — that’s why I really like blogs that allow commenting — but sometimes those comments will trigger a blog post here. That’s what happened today.

The Post

The post that triggered these thoughts and this post is called “The Rational-Irrational Writer” by Therese Walsh. It discusses something called Rational-Emotive Therapy (RET):

…developed by psychologist Albert Ellis. At the heart of RET is a simple but powerful framework that explains how rational and irrational beliefs shape distinct emotional responses: the “ABC model.”

I don’t want to copy and paste Ms Walsh’s post into my blog. I want you to go and read her post, or at least the section titled “An Overabundance of ‘B’,” which explains the ABC(DE) model. It’s short and easy to read and understand. It’ll just take you a second. I’ll wait here.

[calming music plays]

Back? Great!

The post then goes on to explain exactly how the ABC(DE) model applies to writers and our deep-seated fears about calling ourselves writers and being good enough and having all kinds of preconceived beliefs that just aren’t true.

Not Just for Writers!

Everything she’s written is completely valid for writers. But it’s also valid for other people in other endeavors, as I commented on that blog post:

First, this is a great piece that can easily be applied to any endeavor where we have self-doubts.

I’ll elaborate on that here, since I didn’t think it was appropriate on her blog post which is, after all, for writers. I’ll use one of my endeavors as an example: silversmithing.

A stands for activating event. Suppose I apply to a juried art show. (That’s an art show where a panel of judges decide, based on photos of your work, whether your work is appropriate for the show. It usually comes down to quality, originality, etc., but it might also deal with appropriateness for a show’s theme.) I get the jury response and discover that I’m not invited to the show. Being turned down is the activating event.

B stands for belief. On getting turned down, I naturally come to believe that my work is just not good enough.

C stands for consequence. As a consequence of this belief, I start doubting my skills, capabilities, and creativity. I start wondering why I bother to make jewelry and debate whether it’s worth continuing.

D stands for disputation. This is where I (hopefully) start gathering evidence to prove that the belief is wrong. Maybe I applied for six new shows last year and was invited to all of them. Maybe my work sells well at the shows I do attend. Maybe I visit a new wholesale client and she buys half my inventory because she loves it so much. Maybe I discover that the reason I did not get invited to this show was because they limit the number of jewelry artists and all of last year’s artists are returning. (It’s pretty common to give preference to artists who attend each year.)

E stands for effective (and rational) beliefs. I consider all the evidence that my initial belief is wrong and self-defeating and cast it aside to replace it with a more realistic belief that keeps me motivated, working, and improving my skills, allowing me to move forward.

Think about this for a minute and I’m sure you can apply it to anything you do that you might have doubts about.

Imposter Syndrome?

I think Rational-Emotive Therapy can help folks with imposter syndrome. Per Wikipedia:

Impostor syndrome, also known as impostor phenomenon or impostorism, is a psychological experience in which a person suffers from feelings of intellectual and/or professional fraudulence. One source defines it as “the subjective experience of perceived self-doubt in one’s abilities and accomplishments compared with others, despite evidence to suggest the contrary.”

Those who suffer from impostor syndrome often doubt their skills, talents, or accomplishments. They may have a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as frauds. Despite external evidence of their competence, those experiencing this phenomenon do not believe they deserve their success or luck. They may think that they are deceiving others because they feel as if they are not as intelligent as they outwardly portray themselves to be.

Clearly, believing that you are an “imposter” is irrational. After all, you got where you are somehow. Thinking about the situation rationally and disputing those self-defeating beliefs is the first step to getting past imposter syndrome.

‘Nuff said.

One More Word about Writers

I thought I’d share one more thing related to the original post. This is part of the comment I left on that post and it has everything to do with writing or being a writer.

Before I share it, however, I want to remind readers who don’t know me very well that I earned a very good living as writer from around 1990 to 2015. I wrote books about how to use computers at a time when writers couldn’t produce them fast enough to meet the demand from readers, many of whom were just getting started using computers. Things are different now and I doubt many people could make a good living doing this kind of work. But I enjoyed it while it lasted and had a backup career waiting for me (as a helicopter pilot, of all things) when the demand for my kind of books died off.

Here’s what I shared:

I think there are two kinds of writers, with plenty of overlap.

One kind is the writer that I believe that all of us here are: the kind of person who is driven to write, to get words out of our heads and into a format we can share with others. Whether we share it or not is irrelevant. Whether it’s published or not is irrelevant. As you said, writers write. I believe that deep down in my heart. I have been a writer since I was 13.

The other kind of writer is the professional writer: someone who literally writes for some kind of pay. Hopefully, the pay is money, since it’s so much more useful than “exposure,” which too many of us seem to accept. I felt comfortable during my 25 year writing career telling people that I was a writer because that’s how I earned my living. Nowadays, I still write — after all, I’m still that first kind of writer — and I do get paid for some of it, but it’s not how I earn my living. So when people ask now what I do, I don’t tell them I’m a writer.

There’s nothing wrong with being that first kind of writer.

I read and skimmed the latest Joan Westenberg blog post and am left wondering two things: are most people as clueless about what’s important in life as she seems to think they are and why is she wasting her time writing pieces they’ll never read?

Although I usually enjoy Joan Westenberg’s blog, reading the first quarter of today’s post reminded me that a lot of people just don’t get it. She’s describing people I know exist — people who focus their lives on trying to impress others or follow the advice of social media “influencers” rather than pursue what really matters in life. I can’t understand or identify with these people and I have to hope that they aren’t as prevalent as she makes it seem.

The Problem

The problem she’s describing is that too many people are paying attention to and focusing their lives around the advice of advertisers and

…Instagram meal-prep influencers, YouTubers waxing poetic about minimalism from $4,000 Herman Miller chairs, and Twitter productivity gurus who wake up at 4:30 a.m. to drink bulletproof coffee and document their sense of superiority.

She quotes someone named Jean Baudrillard (without a link to the reference; I had to look him up, which makes me think she believes all of her readers should know who this long-dead French philosopher is), saying:

Jean Baudrillard summed it up:

“We are at the point where consumption is laying hold of the whole of life, where all activities are sequenced in the same combinatorial mode, where the course of satisfaction is outlined in advance, hour by hour, where the ‘environment’ is total—fully air-conditioned, organized, culturalized. The beneficiary of the consumer miracle also sets in place a whole array of sham objects, of characteristic signs of happiness, and then waits (wars desperately a moralist would say) for that happiness to alight.”

She goes on to describe something we called “conspicuous consumption” back in the 1980s (when I was in my 20s). My favorite example of this was going to a friend’s apartment — or maybe it was a friend of a friend? — and being shown their brand new bedroom set, which we were led to believe was very costly. I didn’t like it at all; it was more ostentatious than practical. I liked it even less when they said that they bought it because some friends of theirs had bought the same thing.

What? Why would anyone buy something just because someone else they knew had bought it? It was something my 23- or 24-year-old brain couldn’t wrap itself around.

She also touches upon the role of social media influencers and influencer wannabes:

We’ve turned living into editing. When every bite is a performance, every outfit a brand decision, every hobby a pitch, there’s no space left for boredom. Or rest. Or actual pleasure. We scroll through each other’s highlight reels while quietly assembling our own, haunted by the suspicion that everyone else is doing it better—and forgetting to live in any of it.

And later, her awakening:

One night, I just sat on the floor and thought: none of this is working. None of this is helping. I’ve done everything modern culture told me to do to be happy, successful, fulfilled. I was tracking everything but feeling nothing. That was the moment something cracked open in a quiet, defeated realization: I don’t want to live like this. I don’t want my life to be a performance. I don’t want to be optimized. I just want to feel human again. I want to be messy. Boring. Unimpressive. Real.

I don’t know how old she is, but I hope she figured this out before she hit 40. I had this figured out in my 20s. Of course, social media and influencers didn’t exist back then. I guess I’m just lucky — or maybe smart enough? — that I never fell for social media influencer snake oil.

I read this first part of the post in detail, mostly to try to understand the way people think these days. She makes it sound as if everyone except herself (and me, I guess) is chasing down happiness by spending money on shit they don’t need or really even want, putting their lives online to build a fanbase and become an influencer, or brainlessly following the advice of a social media personality with tons of “followers.”

Is it really that bad? Are a lot of people really like that? Is that why the world is going to hell at breakneck speeds these days? No one can think for themselves and if they can, they’re too distracted by advertisers and social media influencers telling us what will make us happy?

Her Solution

She then goes on in detail to describe her philosophy about all of this:

The Ordinary Sacred is my idea for a philosophy of presence without spectacle. A life without audience. A refusal to curate the self into something consumable. It honors sufficiency over scale, texture over narrative, and experience over optics. It says: the real, unpolished, unposted life is enough—and always was.

And this is where she lost me. You see, she’s preaching to the choir. I read the first few paragraphs and thought, duh. I know this stuff and I don’t need some newly enlightened wordsmith, who is trying to make a living spouting philosophy like this, to tell me what I already know. I skimmed the rest of her sermon — all 4,341 words of it. When I was finished and realized that about half of those words were a repetition of what came before, I was left wondering why she was spending her time writing this kind of stuff.

Yes, the message does need to go out to people who aren’t enlightened yet. But does anyone honestly believe that the people who need to learn about this will spend the time necessary to read all 5,243 words of it? For Pete’s sake, that’s 1/10 the length of a short novel. If these people are so sucked into the world of social media and influencers, do you think they’re going to waste time reading something that might help them when TikTok and Instagram are waiting for them with short bursts of dopamine?

I think she’d get her message across a lot better if she’d cut the word count in her posts. The kind of people she is trying to reach with her good advice are the same kind of people who can’t be bothered spending more than a minute or two reading something. That’s if they read at all.

The Irony

I don’t think she sees the irony in what she’s written. Here’s someone who charges a minimum of $50/year for the privilege of commenting on one of her blog posts. There’s a message at the bottom of each one explaining that she wants to make this her full-time gig. Yet early in the piece, when she discusses her awakening, she says:

What if I stopped managing my life like a brand? What if I let it be messy, private, low-stakes? What if that was enough?

Apparently it isn’t enough — after all, she’s trying to monetize her brand.

I’m not knocking someone trying to earn a living from what they write. I did it for more than 20 years and still get paid for some of what I write. I also write a shit-ton I don’t get paid for. (I’ll never say no to reader support, but I’m not going to require a paid membership for commenting on what I write here or elsewhere.) But her writing is definitely brand-building and she is the brand. To say that she wants to stop managing her life as a brand is, frankly, bullshit.

But that’s just my opinion. Another blogger throwing thoughts out onto the void.

Happiness is Easy — and Possible without Hypocrisy

Addressing the problem of people trying (and failing) to find happiness while blindly following the advice of advertisers and social media influencers, the answer is pretty easy:

First, wake the fuck up. These people are not trying to help you. They’re trying to earn a buck off you.

Advertisers want you to buy their product, whether it’s a new face cream, cheap clothing that falls apart after two trips through the laundry, a pair of overpriced sneakers (that’ll likely get even costlier when tariffs on goods from Asia kick in), or a “luxury” car that’ll turn heads and make other idiots jealous. (How do you think Cybertruck owners feel about their purchase decision? People were ridiculing them even before Elon Musk revealed what an enormous asshole he is.)

Social media influencers want clicks and views and likes so they can secure deals with — guess who? Advertisers. They try to do this by being more outrageous than everyone else, chasing down that viral video moment. They want fame to boost their oversized egos. They want to think they’re important when, in reality, they’re mostly blood-sucking leeches, often misleading their followers with bad (or paid-for) advice.

As for trying to become an influencer, do you really want to deal with that shit? That’s what Joan is saying early on in her piece, when she starts coming to the realization that it’s all futile bullshit (not her words; my translation). You can work your ass off to develop a brand or a following and get nowhere. Heck, I got sucked in on my helicopter YouTube channel. It was bringing in real money for a while and that motivated me to spend too much time making more videos. When I realized that the harder I worked, the more revenues dropped off, I woke the fuck up and realized I could better spend my time doing things I wanted to do.

It’s idiotic to live your life in an effort to impress other people. News flash: no one who matters really cares. It’s up to you to decide who really matters. I hope you’ll choose yourself, family you love, and close (AKA real) friends. Those are the people you should be pleasing — not some stranger on social media who’s so bored with his own life that he wastes his time following others’. That’s how you reach true happiness.

And that doesn’t mean you need to feel guilty about buying yourself something you want or need. God knows I do — and I have been since I’ve been able to afford to. Whether it’s a $45 scarf that I saw in a SeaTac airport shop three times before I finally bought it or a boat that qualifies as a second residence, these things honestly make me happy. The scarf is beautiful and warm and red, which is a color I really like. The boat was a wonderful, life-changing challenge to cruise thousands of miles in, seeing new things and meeting new people along the way. (It’s red, too, but that’s a coincidence.) These things make me happy because of the way they make me feel when I use them. Like the little red (not a coincidence) Honda in my garage — I call it my “joy machine” for a reason.

What you want to avoid is buying or doing something because you want to impress other people in one way or another. (Screw the latest moronic TikTok challenge!) Or because some influencer said it makes them feel good or be healthier or whatever. It’s not about them. It’s not about others at all. It’s about you and the people who matter to you.

Tuning Out Social Media

I’ve talked a lot recently about social media and feel as if I’ve finally fully woken the fuck up about that, too. I’ve blogged about it quite a bit. Here are some relatively recent posts charting my progression — or maybe awakening? Maybe some of these will strike a chord with you:

• The Joys of Social Media – Nov 22 2022
• Is Social Media Destroying Your Mind? July 26 2024
• My Growing Dissatisfaction with Social Media – Feb 1 2025
• Social Media Posts I Didn’t Share Today, March 21, 2025 Edition – Mar 21 2025
• Social Media Posts I Didn’t Share Today, March 22, 2025 Edition – Mar 23 2025

If you’re sharing your whole life on social media, ask yourself: why? I know why I share what I share: I want people to see that the world is big and show them my view of it. It’s one of the reasons I blog and publish videos on YouTube. I like to think that some of what I share interests or educates people. Maybe it does. I don’t expect (or want) to become yet another cheesy influencer. I don’t even want to impress people. Mostly when I share something a bit outrageous, it’s to prove that the thing is possible. Yes, a 60-something year old woman (with Covid) can tow a 23,000 pound wide load from Chicago to Seattle accompanied by just two small dogs.

If you feel as if you might be sucked into the world of social media and influencers and you want to understand why and how to fix it, I recommend that you read Joan’s post. Do it when you have some time to really think about. Stick with it until the end. Maybe the next time you’re in a coffee shop, instead of scrolling Instagram and Facebook or watching TikTok videos or sharing photos of the fancy foam on your latte — what is the story with that? — use your phone to learn something, maybe about yourself.

‘Nuff said.

I’m Done

As for Joan’s blog, I think it’s time to get it out of my feed reader. I can’t see spending time (or money) to follow a blog that neither entertains nor educates me. And frankly, I’m tired of reading sermons not meant for me.

I wish her luck.

I decided to take a break from social media and need someplace to put my posts. Here they are.

Yesterday, I realized that because of filtering on my preferred social media account (Mastodon), I was only seeing about 5% of the posts being shared by the people I follow. I’ve been using filters extensively to block out posts that mention most political and controversial topics, and those filters work pretty well. Every once in a while, I need to add a new name or phrase or hashtag, but, for the most part, I’m simply not seeing the “doomscrolling” crap that’s out there. And that’s fine with me.

The trouble is, people aren’t sharing objective news stories nearly as much as they’re sharing opinion pieces or facts that have been cherry-picked to increase outrage. That seems to be the purpose of all of it: enticing outrage from the masses — or at least those on social media. Making people mad so they wear pink hats or boycott giant conglomerates (that don’t even feel the effect of boycotts) or sign an online petition or set Teslas on fire. All useless gestures that don’t do a fucking thing to make the situation any better. (Well, maybe the flaming Teslas do.)

I don’t know about you, but I’m outraged enough. I don’t need to read countless news stories and opinion pieces shared on social media to make angry. I’m about as fucking angry as a person can get.

I get my news from my own sources, which tend to present facts versus opinions, although that’s not to say I won’t browse through a few opinion pieces to make sure my outrage isn’t an overreaction. (It isn’t.) So yes, I do know what’s going on. My head is not in the sand. But I certainly have no need to doomscroll or to be ignored when I urge my fellow Americans — the same folks trying to get us all outraged — to actually do something that might tip the scales.

And that’s what happened yesterday. I saw an “outrage post” in my feed that was one too many. I was already filtering 95% of what should be reaching me and even the unfiltered stuff had more of the same. I was done.

Today’s Social Media Posts

Of course, I can’t just stop posting what’s going on in my day. So I’ll put those posts here instead and they’ll show up on this blog. We’ll see how long I last. I’m shooting for a week, but who knows?

Friday, March 21, 2025 8:25 AM
I won’t be on social media today. The only thing I’ll post — which will actually be posted automatically — is a link to this blog post and perhaps another one I’m planning to write. I hope everyone had a great day.

Friday, March 21, 2025 8:27 AM
Late start to the day, but I have an ambitious to-do list that includes more writing work on my Great Loop book, some boat chores, some house chores, the completion of some earrings I left unfinished, and an afternoon or evening of bookbinding.

Friday, March 21, 2025 8:35 AM
Zoom meeting reminders are a great thing. Without the one I just got in email, I would have completely forgotten about the seminar I signed up for this morning. (In my defense, it was scheduled for noon but I didn’t realize it was noon EDT.)

Friday, March 21, 2025 10:53 AM
I wrote a blog post about the difficulty in getting the right part for my boat’s anchor chain. https://aneclecticmind.com/2025/03/21/my-chain-link-connector-ordeal/

Friday, March 21, 2025 10:53 AM
File this under Idiotic IOT Device for Deep Pocketed Suckers.

Friday, March 21, 2025 2:12 PM
I’ve finally gotten around to setting up an online shop to support my creative efforts through donations and sponsorships. The main reason I did this? I’m prepping to accept pre-orders for autographed copies of my book. You can find the site at: https://aneclecticmind.square.site/

Friday, March 21, 2025 2:16 PM
Raining hard outside right now.

Friday, March 21, 2025 2:52 PM
One of today’s creative projects was creating “wrappers” for the little notebooks I’ve been making as I build my bookbinding skills. I’m using all kinds of papers and some are printed with lines and grids. The wrappers tell potential buyers what’s inside without them having to handle them. I’m hoping to sell these in my jewelry booth at art shows, although I might add them to my personal online shop.

 
Three of my notebooks with the new wrappers on them.

Friday, March 21, 2025 4:23 PM
Finally got those copper spiral hoop earrings done. 5 pairs added to inventory. I make a fine silver version of these earrings, too. You can find all of the earrings I make here: https://mljewelrydesigns.square.site/shop/earrings/26.

Friday, March 21, 2025 6:19 PM
Finally tracked down the link for the video seminar I attended this morning: Mastering Your On-Camera Presence. I really thought it was an excellent seminar. You can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fQCgMxGPrw

Friday, March 21, 2025 6:50 PM
The enshittification of search continues. I searched for “mandalorian season 4” and the top result was eBay. And yes, this was Duck Duck Go.

Ad for eBay is the top result for a totally unrelated search.

Friday, March 21, 2025 6:55 PM
That’s it for me today. Again, I hope everyone had a great day. And I’m not fooling myself: I doubt a single person on Mastodon missed me.

Please understand the differences in what you’re finding online.

It’s March 2025 and eggs — the kind that come out of chickens and are a staple in American breakfasts — are not only in short supply, but more expensive than ever. This is a fact that you can confirm for yourself by visiting any supermarket or grocery store that sells them.

Bird flu is spreading throughout the US. It has caused the death or destruction of millions of commercial egg farm hens. This is also a fact. Here are some recent trustworthy references to support this:

• “USDA rolls out 5-step plan to battle avian flu in poultry,” University of Minnesota
• “ICYMI: Bird Flu Is Roiling Egg Farms Across The Country,” NPR 1A (podcast)
• “Hickman’s Family Farms struggles to meet egg demand after losing a million birds,” Arizona Republic

Hens lay eggs. Fewer hens mean fewer eggs. This is a combination of fact and logic. As someone who has had a backyard flock of hens on and off for the past 30 years, I can assure you that the more hens I have in my flock, the more eggs I get.

The economic concept of supply and demand states that, well, you can read it for yourself in this quote from the Supply and Demand entry in Britannica Money:

supply and demand, in economics, [is the] relationship between the quantity of a commodity that producers wish to sell at various prices and the quantity that consumers wish to buy. It is the main model of price determination used in economic theory. The price of a commodity is determined by the interaction of supply and demand in a market. The resulting price is referred to as the equilibrium price and represents an agreement between producers and consumers of the good. In equilibrium the quantity of a good supplied by producers equals the quantity demanded by consumers.

I was a business major in college so I took Economics 101 and 102. I know this stuff. It makes sense to me. And if you think about it, it should make sense to you. Prices on items that are scarce but in demand are generally higher than the same item if it’s available in higher quantities. This can be a natural result of marketplace economics, as the above paragraph suggests, or it can be manipulated by sellers to either increase profits on scarce commodities or control the sale of them.

An example of using price to control sales is what I recently saw in a local supermarket that had some eggs available for sale. If you bought one or two dozen, they were about $7/dozen. But if you bought more than two dozen, the price went up to about $10/dozen. Hoarding has become a problem with the egg shortage and this supermarket was trying to discourage that behavior by jacking up the prices for hoarders.

That’s not to say that some producers, wholesalers, or retailers aren’t trying to cash in on the shortages. There will always be people and organizations that take advantage of a situation.

In the case of producers, I don’t blame them one bit. If you had a flock of a 10,000 chickens and lost 7,500 of them to bird flu — science says it’s 75% to 100% deadly to birds — you’d not only have to spend a boatload of cash to make sure your facility was free of the pathogens, but you’d have to buy 7,500 replacement birds. Commercial hens might be different, but I know I had to wait four to five months for any of the chicks I obtained to start laying in my backyard. That’s a huge cash outlay and reduced productivity for months. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to cash in on the eggs being laid by the 2,500 birds I have left. Supply and demand supports this, especially since the loss of hens is so widespread.

But this is still an opinion. You might think it’s fine for farmers to take a hit that might actually drive them out of business. That’s your opinion.

The farther you go up the chain from the producer with suddenly less product to sell, the less acceptable it is to cash in on the scarcity. But that’s still a moral judgement or opinion. It is not a fact.

And then there are the conspiracy theories. Big Henhouse is controlling the price of eggs and using bird flu as an excuse. There really isn’t a shortage at all. They’re just pretending it is to separate consumers from their money.

Is this a fact? No. Is it based on facts? Perhaps a few. Maybe egg prices are unreasonably high in an area that hasn’t been hit by bird flu. But maybe those producers are also sending their eggs out to areas that have been devastated by bird flu.

What is the truth? What are the facts? Are these Big Henhouse price gouging conspiracy theories what’s actually going on? Or are they just a tool to focus your hate and anger on big business?

If you’re actually trying to answer what I’ve posed as rhetorical questions, don’t just share the first Google hit that supports your view. Look at the source of the information. Far left? Far right? Anti-big business? Or a news outlet that tends to focus on fact-based reporting? Don’t respond to this post with something you read on the New Republic or in Mother Jones or in a blog post in a popular blog. That’s not news. It’s opinion and/or theory based on cherry-picked data.

I don’t know about you, but now that I’m not producing my own eggs and feeling forced to eat them every day just to keep up with production, a dozen lasts me more than a week. Yes, I’m one person and I understand that larger households probably eat more eggs. Although the prices will never get down to what they used to be — ever heard of inflation? — they should eventually come down as the bird flu problems are resolved and flocks are rebuilt. Until then, if you find them too expensive for your household, eat fewer eggs. You don’t need them for breakfast every morning. And you don’t need as many as you think you might.

Otherwise, just stop stressing over the price of eggs and worrying about who is profiting in the current situation. Despite what your super socialist friends might think, price fixing by the government is not a reasonable long term solution — especially with the current government. Buy only what you need to help prevent scarcity. If everyone did this — remember supply and demand? — the prices will likely come down sooner than later.

In which I attempt to encourage you to follow your dreams and try to tell you how.

Like most people these days, I spend time socializing on social media. In my case, it’s Mastodon, a system remarkably like Twitter in the early days, where you can post short “toots” with text, images, links, and/or polls and then discuss them with the other folks who have seen them. There are lots of differences between Mastodon and other social media, and because that’s not really what this post is about, I’ll skip a deeper discussion. Let’s just say that because there’s no algorithm determining what you see, you see all of the toots posted by all of the people you follow, as well as the conversations between the people you follow, even if you’re not involved in that conversation.

I use social media for the social aspect of it. I’m not trying to become an influencer or increase my follower count. Although I will occasionally post links to new jewelry items I made and put up for sale and I always link to new blog posts (which is done automatically), I mostly just share images, observations, thoughts, and short term plans with the folks who follow me. I’m pretty much looking to see the same thing from the people I follow. I don’t see many toots every day (considering the hundreds of people I follow) and that’s because I have filters set up to block out all the political crap going on in the world. I’m not sticking my head in the sand, but I’m also not stupid enough to get my news from social media. (If you’re getting your news and “facts” from social media, take a moment to think about why and whether it’s really a good idea. No need to tell us your conclusions here, though.)

One of the things that makes me inordinately sad these days is the number of posts by people I like who mention something they want to do but can’t. Sometimes they explain why they can’t, otherwise, they just leave the reasons unspoken. Maybe the thing they want to do is so outrageous (at least in their minds) that they feel that don’t need to explain why.

Either way, I’m left to wonder how much they really want to do this thing that they “can’t” do.

Making Excuses

Eight and a half years ago, in July 2016, I wrote a blog post titled “Making It Happen.” In that post, I focused on my personal achievements as they related to my ownership of a helicopter and the building of a successful career as a pilot — when I was in my 40s. I talked about how I was able to achieve a goal that most people — including me at one time — think is out of reach.

In that blog post, I relate a short anecdote about an airline pilot friend questioning why I was bothering to learn how to fly helicopters when I’d never make any money doing it. He was basically saying I was wasting my time. I went on to write:

But think about how easy it would have been to accept his “expert opinion” and not try to move forward with any kind of career as a pilot. It was a built-in excuse for failure. Why try if this guy who knows the industry better than me says it’s impossible?

How many people do that? How many people simply don’t try because they think the odds are stacked up too high against them?

I wish I had a dollar for every person, man or woman, who told me that they “always wanted to learn to fly.” My question to them is this: what’s stopping you? (I sure hope it isn’t an asshole like my former airline pilot friend.)

I don’t want to re-write that post here — you can go read it for yourself if you want a more specific example from my life of what I’m trying to communicate here. But I do want to share one more paragraph:

Everyone dreams of doing or learning something special that’s important to them, but how many people do it? Some try but fail because they don’t realize from the get-go that achieving a difficult goal is a lot of hard work with very long hours and no guarantee of success. It takes planning, it takes funding, it takes the ability to work smart and have Plan B (or C or D) ready when things don’t work out as you expected. It’s easier to not try and to simply keep dreaming.

How Important Is It?

And that brings me back to my social media friends and their toots about dreams they “can’t” fulfill.

The other day, in a conversation about the most recent stock market downturn (which looks pretty bad this time), I tooted:

It always comes back, but now that I’m tapping into it to buy silly things like food and the occasional computer monitor, I’m just hoping that if we do have another long-term dip, I’m still alive when it comes back.

I tried retirement and it doesn’t suit me. Gotta keep busy. The trick is getting someone to pay me for that busy time.

The person I was conversing with replied:

Not to minimize what you’re saying, which is certainly legitimate. But I would love to trade having a 9-to-5 for trying to convince people to pay me.

With the way things have been going lately, let me know if you need a deckhand. I can tie a few knots reasonably well, I can read a chart, and I can reliably put in to a dock under sail power. I know that last one isn’t relevant, but I still am amazed I can do it and i think its okay to brag every once in a while.

Okay, so in one toot he confessed two wishes for changing his life:

• going freelance
• working on a sailboat

He didn’t mention how much he really wanted to do either of these things, but he was clearly thinking about them. Are they important goals? Something he’d really like to achieve? Or was he just being conversational?

(Also, I bet he ties knots better than I do.)

But the one that really broke my heart this week was this one, tagged #3GoodThings:

– You can’t go, but you can dream about going, and that’s something.

– You can’t do, but you can dream about doing, and that’s something.

– Fancy coffee.

My questions to this person — which I did not ask — are:

• Why can’t you go? How much do you want to go?
• Why can’t you do? How much do you want to do it?
• Why are you apparently satisfied with dreaming about going or doing?

It takes a great deal of self-control to not draw people who post things like this into conversations. But that’s what this blog is for. I can address these things for a bigger audience while leaving the people who got me thinking about it anonymous.

If You Really Want It, Do Something about It!

Let’s do a little exercise together, shall we?

1. What do you want to do?

Think about something you’d like to do. Something you’d really like to do.

Learn to speak another language? Play the piano? Visit Notre Dame? See the Pyramids? Go sailing? Learn to fly? Juggle? Watch a Navajo weaver make a rug? Visit 100 countries before you’re 50? (or 60 or 70?) Run a marathon? Be an artist?

I could go on and on with all kinds of suggestions, but these are just seeds to get you started. I’m sure you have at least five things you can come up with that you’d like to do.

Note that I said do and not buy or own or have. We’re not talking about material things here. We’re talking about doing things.

Brainstorm until you’ve got a few. If you need to, set a 5- or 10-minute timer to think only about these things. Don’t get distracted! Write them down.

2. How much do you want to do them?

Now think about how much you want to do these things. How important are they to you? How they might change your life to make it better. Make some notes.

Do not think about why you can’t do them. Not yet.

If you have more than one — and you really should — rank them in order of importance. Which one is most important to you? Which one do you want to do most?

3. What are your excuses?

Let’s focus on that number one item. Ask yourself why you aren’t doing that thing. What are your excuses?

Excuses are what’s holding you back. Some of them are good, valid excuses. Some of them are just plain dumb. Let’s look at an example.

Suppose you want to learn to fly like so many passengers in my helicopter have told me they wanted to do. Here are some possible excuses — the ones I’ve actually heard:

1. I’m afraid of heights.
2. I’m worried about crashing.
3. It’s expensive.
4. I worry about something happening to me and my wife/kid/etc being left alone.
5. A friend said I could never make money doing it so I’d be wasting my time and money.
6. The weather sucks where I live.
7. I don’t have an airplane so when would I get to fly?

4. Which excuse(s) are valid?

Now look at all those excuses objectively and cross out the ones that are bullshit. If #1 and #2 are true, you really don’t want to learn how to fly. #5 is bogus; who cares what your friend told you? #6 is also bogus; weather changes and do you think you’ll live in the same place your whole life? #4 is problematic in that it assumes the worst — and indicates a very pessimistic view of your abilities. (Also, you’ve heard of life insurance, haven’t you?) #7 can be overcome with airplane rentals. Your flight school will rent an airplane to you. That ties in a bit with #4, which is probably a pretty valid concern, especially if you decide you want to fly helicopters.

Take the remaining list of excuses after you’ve crossed off the bogus ones and look at them one by one. It’s time to work around the excuses.

Coming Up with a Plan

Are you still with me in this exercise? I hope so.

At this point, you should have a very important personal goal written down in front of you. Beneath it are a list of excuses and you’ve crossed out the ones that are bogus. You’re left with one or more excuses — which we’ll now call hurdles — that are stopping you from moving forward with your goal.

Hurdles can be jumped. Or knocked over if you’re not much of a jumper.

Say the hurdle is money — which it so often is. It’s time to do some research. What is achieving this goal going to cost? In your actual currency of choice?

Make some notes about what it’ll cost to get started. You’ll need to actually do some real research on this. Don’t guess. Work the web. Make some calls. Get some real data. Write it down.

So many things have costs up front and along the way. Let’s take the learn to fly example. Here are some of the steps along the way:

1. Take a demo flight. Do this first to make sure you like it.
2. Sign up for classes. (I highly recommend that you do not pay for all training up front, regardless of any discounts they might offer. I could write a whole blog post about that, but not today.)
3. Obtain equipment you need: headset, chart, ground school training materials, etc. Keep in mind that you may be able to borrow some of this stuff or buy it second hand. That’ll save money.
4. Take classes. There are different prices per hour for dual flight time and ground school time.
5. Take tests. You need to pass a ground school test and there are test fees.
6. Take more classes.
7. Solo and get your solo flight time in.
8. Take your flight test.

Did I forget anything? Probably. You will, too. But be as thorough as you can.

By the time you’re done and have added it all up, you might be freaking out. Don’t. Money is just a hurdle. And in most cases, you won’t need all of the money to achieve your goal up front. You can often pay as you go.

Now it’s time to start brainstorming about ways to jump (or knock over) this hurdle. Look at your monthly spending. Where can you cut back? Can you reliably save $X per week or payday or month to cover the cost of this goal? I know folks don’t like it when people suggest cutting their coffee routine, but look at it realistically: if that latte costs $8 per day with a tip and you’re having it five days a week, that’s $40 a week and $160 a month. It doesn’t seem like much, but it adds up. What else can you cut? Streaming services? Magazine or software subscriptions? Dinner out? Car washes? Mani/pedi? Dog grooming? Happy hour gatherings? Weekend getaways? Lawn service? How about selling some of the crap in your garage or basement that you don’t need? That old exercise bike or set of cross country skis? (Or snowshoes? What was I thinking?)

How important is this goal to you? What are you willing to sacrifice to succeed?

Because sacrifice is what it’s all about. If you already have excuses for why you can’t do something, something has to change to make those excuses go away. You might have to give up something you currently have or do to move forward on what you want do do.

This is one example of one of the most common excuses for why we don’t do most things we want to do: money. We can’t afford it. Or we claim we can’t. But if we look long and hard at our current situation and way of life, maybe we can afford it — if we give up other things that aren’t as important.

Look at your excuses. Think about how you can get around them.

Trust me: if you want to do something badly enough, you can find ways to get around the hurdles.

Don’t Sit On Your Ass

I have to bring up my wasband here because my observations of him are a great example to share. My friend Jim hates when I mention my wasband in blog posts, but I was with the idiot for 29 years and it’s hard to avoid mentioning someone I was with for nearly half my life. (Hey, Jim? If you’re still reading these, skip ahead to the next section heading.)

My wasband wasn’t a dumb guy. From the day I met him in 1983, he impressed me with his apparent drive to do things with his life. He told me he was an inventor and he showed me the fiber optics he was playing with at the time. This was long before fiber optics became an important part of communications and almost a household word.

I say “apparent” — did you catch that? — because although he seemed ambitious and interested in chasing down his own personal goals, he never did. He never did anything with his fiber optic cable ideas. He never did anything with his solar power ideas. He never invented anything. When challenged about this, he claimed that designing the big, custom HVAC systems he did in his job as a manufacturer’s rep was “inventing.” Whatever.

Later in life, as I started and continued my journey down various career paths, I also started chasing down my own life goals. Learning to ride a motorcycle. Horseback riding and owning horses. Racing around lakes on jet skis. Learning to fly. In each case, I took the steps necessary to achieve a goal — for example, buying a motorcycle and signing up for motorcycle training — and he just followed. My goals became his goals. That was fine; it meant that we could do things together. But he never chased down his own goals. He didn’t seem to have any. Well, yeah, he did learn to fly a plane and even became a partner owning one, but he rarely flew it anywhere.

He told me once that he wanted to be a flight instructor in retirement. Great goal! Make it happen! (Ironically, that’s the phrase he repeatedly told me when our relationship and I were still young.) Making it happen meant building a certain number of flight hours. That was easy, considering he owned a plane hangared three miles away our home and we lived in AZ with near perfect weather all the time. It meant going back to flight school to become a commercial pilot and then getting his flight instructor rating. There was a clear path he needed to follow. He had the time, he had the plane, he had the money. But he didn’t do it. To this day, I don’t know why. I have to think that it just wasn’t that important to him.

I seem to have a knack for cramming vehicles into large spaces. Here’s my Wickenburg hangar back in October 2011. You can see my helicopter, my fifth wheel (which I lived in every summer when I worked in Washington state), and my wasband’s plane along with the golf cart I used to pull the helicopter out. I purposely bought a trailer big enough for the two of us to do long-term travel in, but I don’t think he spent more than 20 nights in it.

He also told me that he wanted to open a bike shop. A place to sell and repair bicycles. This was later in our relationship, as we were getting older. My helicopter work was taking me to Washington state every summer, which was a great escape from Arizona’s heat. The area had an amazing 11-mile bike path along the river. I suggested building a mobile business based out of a trailer that could be brought up to a park near that bike path in the summer and brought back south in the winter. Yes, I was on call and needed to fly when it rained, but when it wasn’t raining, I could help him with rentals and other parts of the business. We could be together all year, even when I had to travel north to fly. In the winter, he could set up somewhere closer to home or just focus on sales and repairs. It seemed like a great plan, a way to help him achieve his goal. But did he do anything about it? No. Nothing. Nothing at all for any kind of bike shop business.

And I won’t even go into his failed attempt to start a solar power business. What a farce that was. It takes more than buying a two-line fax machine and sitting at a desk to get a business going.

So you might be wondering what he did instead of working on any of these goals. The answer is pretty simple. After work, he sat on his ass in front of the television, channel surfing. He claimed he needed to “unwind.” Either none of his goals were important enough for him to chase down or he simply wasn’t willing to make any sacrifices to achieve them.

When our relationship ended, he was bouncing from one 9-5 gig to another, rapidly aging his way out of the job market. I have no idea what he’s doing today, or if he’s even still alive.

Clearly, this was a man who wasn’t very serious about making anything happen.

Don’t Give Up without Trying

Why am I telling you about him? Because I don’t want you to be like him.

If you have a goal, whether it’s to develop a new skill, take a trip, change your career, or start a business, do something about it. Make it happen!

As I said in that post from 2016:

What I do want to touch on briefly here is the fact that just about all of us have it within our power to make things happen for ourselves.

…

But do you really want to wake up one day when you’re 56 years old and realize that your life is more than half over and you haven’t achieved what you wanted to? (I think that’s what happened to my wasband; it pretty much caused him to lose his mind in a midlife crisis that went horribly wrong.) We only have one life. Why would you let it go by without at least trying to achieve your dreams?

Please. Do this for yourself.

I tell yet another long backstory and get a few things off my chest. Sorry about the dirty laundry.

The other day, I did something I didn’t want to do: I bought a new monitor for my computer on Amazon.com.

The Monitor Backstory

It isn’t that I didn’t want to buy the monitor — I definitely did. Years ago, when I wrote books for a living, I had a wonderful computer setup that consisted of a 27″ iMac with a 24″ second monitor. I needed all that real estate for the work I was doing, laying out book pages on one screen and working with images, files, email, social media, and who knows what else on the other. It made my work easier and more pleasant to do, especially when I started getting involved in video projects for my helicopter YouTube channel, FlyingMAir.

But things change. I sold the helicopter and stopped doing videos. I bought a boat and started spending months on it at a time. I didn’t need a desktop computer so I traded it in for a new laptop. Along the way, I sold that second monitor, which, in all honesty, wasn’t that good anyway.

But now I’m spending more time at home again, prepping to lay out another book, and making boating videos for my personal YouTube channel. So I bought a Mac Mini from Apple and bought a 27″ Dell UltraSharp monitor from Amazon to go with it.

The monitor is great and has more useful features than I need to cover here. It was working okay, but I really did miss that second monitor. So when I got home from my brief (comparatively speaking) trip south this winter, I decided it was time. I’d buy another monitor — preferably the same model — and set it side by side with the one I already had. It would make me more productive, I reasoned (whether rightly or wrongly). And yes, I’ll admit that the desire for some retail therapy weighed into the purchase decision.

And that brings me to Wednesday’s purchase.

The Amazon Backstory

I have been using Amazon.com since the only thing it sold was books. I was a Prime member when it was $49 (or maybe $39?) a year and all it got me was free 2-day shipping. I have spent thousands of dollars on Amazon over the years — sometimes more than $10,000 in a single year.

Sounds like I’m a real fan, right? Well, maybe I was but I’m not anymore. I dumped Prime when it got up to $149/year. (I think that’s what it is now, no?) I don’t watch TV and 2-day shipping is something Amazon stopped doing to my home back around Covid. I don’t like the way Amazon dominates the market and is putting smaller businesses out of business. I didn’t like the way “marketplace” vendors could be unreliable. I didn’t like the way search results — unless you had a specific make/model in mind — brought up so much crappy Chinese junk. And when it screwed up three of my orders right before Christmas, I started wondering why I was using Amazon at all. Surely I could just find stuff elsewhere.

So around mid-December 2024, I stopped buying at Amazon. Completely.

It wasn’t easy. You don’t realize how easy it is to fire up the Amazon app on your phone or tablet, find what you want (or think you want), and order it. With Amazon out of the picture, I had to source the things I couldn’t find locally elsewhere. It was a struggle. But I was succeeding. Up until Wednesday, I hadn’t ordered a single thing from Amazon. That’s about two months.

And I would have kept up the streak if it weren’t for the damn monitor.

Shopping for This One Specific Thing

You see, I wanted the exact same monitor. I knew it would work well with my Mac. I confirmed that it could be daisy-chained, via USB C, to the one I already had. I knew that my little Mac Mini could support two UHD displays. Not only that, but because they were identical, they’d line up perfectly, side by side, on my desktop, making a seamless ultra-wide monitor with plenty of easily accessible real estate.

So I fired up Duck Duck Go — my current search engine of choice; don’t get me started on Google — and put in the monitor’s model number: U2723QE. Of course, Amazon appeared at the top of the search results, but I ignored it. I figured that I’d buy it at B&H, which is where I’d seen it at a slightly higher price than Amazon in autumn.

But that price had gone up. And, to make an already too long story a tiny bit shorter, I’ll summarize my shopping experience: the monitor was more than $100 less on Amazon than anywhere else. And I think I looked just about everywhere.

Although most pricing I saw was in the $540 to $590 range, I actually saw this monitor for more than $600 on AliExpress, which someone on social media suggested.

I stressed over this purchase. The way I saw it was that I had two choices: (1) I could save more than $100 by breaking my No-Amazon streak and buying it on Amazon or (2) I could skip buying it. There was no way I was going to spend $100 more than I had to.

I discussed this dilemma on my social media network of choice, Mastodon. The replies started coming in. The general consensus was that avoiding Amazon purchases when possible was a good thing. But when I needed to make a purchase and Amazon’s price was far better than anyone else’s, I should just go for it.

So I did.

And Now to the Point of this Post

All that is backstory. What would one of my blog posts be without backstory?

It was one of the replies to my post about the purchase that really got under my skin. I don’t want to put the poster in the spotlight because maybe that person didn’t mean to trigger me. But I was definitely triggered and that’s what this post is all about.

The reply was:

You could always donate a portion of the money you saved to an organization you support…

I was (possibly unreasonably) offended by this.

The main and somewhat obvious reason this might offend me is the insinuation that I don’t normally contribute to charitable organizations. That cannot be farther from the truth, as I attempted to make clear (with possibly some humor?) in my response:

The organization I support right now is my grocery bill, which was $200 yesterday for one person for one week. And I didn’t even buy eggs. ;-)

Throughout the year, however, I donate to NPR, Wikipedia, World Kitchen, Pro Publica, Goodwill, the Humane Society, and others. That comes to a lot more than what I saved today.

Ben had it right: a penny saved is a penny earned. The more I save, the more I can spend elsewhere, whether its on me or for charitable donations.

(The Ben I’m referring to here is Ben Franklin, of course. He was a smart guy, even if he never really did say “A penny saved is a penny earned”.)

But the deeper reason it offended me was because I saw it as someone trying to tell me how to spend my money — and that is a particularly sore spot with me.

Don’t Tell Me How to Spend My Money

The way I see it is this: I earned everything I own, either through hard, smart work or through good investments. No, I didn’t get everything right, but I got enough right to put me where I am today as a financially secure home owner with enough money in the bank to make money one of my lesser concerns in life. There’s no generational wealth propping me up — as a few people with giant chips on their shoulders seem to think. Since graduating from college back in 1982, I have never asked for or received any financial help from anyone in my family or elsewhere, no matter how much I needed it.

One of the ways I got to financial security was by making enough good financial decisions. The purchase of this monitor at Amazon for a savings of $100 is an example on a micro level. The purchase of a $346K helicopter, straight from the factory, that formed the basis of a lucrative 15-year career as an agricultural pilot is an example at a more macro level.

I spend my money the way I see fit. Yes, I have three vehicles, but the newest one is 12 years old. (The oldest is 26 now.) They all run, they all serve their purpose. And they’re all paid for. Why should I replace any of them if they’re doing what I need them to do? Why would I want to spend money on something with no real benefit? I’m not trying to impress anyone with what I drive. Why should I?

I’d rather have three old vehicles in my garage than just one with a loan on it.

Do you realize that the money I saved by not buying a new (to me) vehicle every two years — as my wasband was so fond of doing — is probably why I was able to pay off the mortgage on my home in less than 10 years? Do the math, folks. Home ownership might be more within reach than you think if you just adjust what you’re spending your money on.

And that’s the point. We all need to decide what’s important to us. It’s more important to me to have financial security with a paid-for home than to drive something new and flashy every few years. It might be more important to you to get your kid into a special school than to buy a home. Or more important to buy assets or get specialized training to build your business than take a vacation in Europe. We need to make our own decisions — and to respect the decisions of others.

The Sore Spot

Two and a half years ago, after spending a total of 10 weeks with two different boat captains on their boats along the Great Loop, I decided I wanted to cruise the Loop in my own boat. I had sold my helicopter and my charter business and had money to spend on a relatively new (but admittedly costly) “pocket yacht” that would meet my needs. I was very excited about the purchase and my upcoming journey. I wanted to share that excitement with people who meant a lot to me.

This is one of the photos on the brokerage website. I have a fondness for red, but that’s not what drew me to this boat. It was absolutely perfect for me — and a good deal, to boot.

But rather than them accept my purchase decision, they decided that they needed to tell me what a bad idea it was and to tell me what I should do instead. Their reaction made a few things clear:

• They didn’t know me very well. This is nuts considering I already had a track record of doing unusual things.
• They didn’t trust my ability to make my own financial decisions. This is also nuts given that I’m probably in better financial shape than they are.
• They thought they had the right to tell me how to spend my money. This is also nuts given that neither one of them did very much of interest with theirs.

This situation put a rift in our relationship that has yet to be mended. I was offended by their stance and made it clear to them. They have neither apologized nor made any efforts to repair the rift.

And this is what makes people telling me how to spend my money a sore spot.

I should mention here that, like the helicopter, the boat and the experiences it has made possible have given my life a new trajectory at a time I really needed one. I completed the 8000+ mile Great Loop trip and am working on a book about it. I’ve already written articles about it. I’ve become a USCG licensed boat captain and have already done some paying work for people who needed training on their own new boats and have secured gigs with at least two boat training organizations. I’ve become a certified boat instructor for single and twin engine power boats. And I’ve put my boat — which is a valuable asset, after all — into a charter program where it will earn money for me this coming boating season and possibly seasons beyond. None of this would be possible if I had not bought the boat that they told me not to buy.

They might be satisfied sitting at home, pulling pages off their calendars as the days of our lives tick by, but I’m not.

Are you still reading?

This post has been an unusually circuitous drive. Like so many of my blog posts these days, I wrote it, in part, to clear my mind of things that were bothering me. Someone insinuating that I didn’t make charitable contributions — by suggesting I do so with the savings on a computer monitor purchase — both bugged and triggered me. I felt a need to get this — including the dirty laundry that went with it — off my chest.

I guess the message I have for you is this: money is probably one of those topics we shouldn’t be talking about, like religion and politics. If you feel the need to tell someone how to spend — or not spend — their money, why not hold back? Unless the person is making a lot of seriously dumb decisions that are causing financial harm, they probably don’t need or want your advice.

Instead, why not take a closer look at your own spending habits and how they are serving you?

I develop a daily puzzle routine — with friends — to keep my mind challenged.

I’ve always been a fan of word games and puzzles, whether it’s something like Wordle or a crossword puzzle or the Washington Post’s excellent Keyword game. I’ve been doing them on and off for a while, but have recently made them, and other games, part of a morning routine.

The Routine

I wake very early — usually between 4 and 5 AM. (And please don’t lecture me about going to bed later; don’t you think I’ve tried?) I don’t mind waking up early. A year or two ago, I developed a morning routine that kills those first two or so hours pleasantly. It consists of these things, usually in this order:

• Morning bathroom visit.
• Make coffee.
• Put my Apple watch on the charger. (I wear it overnight to track my sleep.)
• Get back into bed with my coffee and turn on the light. (It’s still dark here this time of year at 5 AM. It won’t be in a few months.)
• Use my iPad to check in on social media. I’m on just Mastodon now and I’ve used extensive filtering to block out 90% of the political crap going on. (I do this for mental health reasons. I still know what’s going on, but I don’t have to live and breathe it.) So catching up on what went on overnight is usually pretty quick.

• 
  Last week’s Keyword Results. I think this might have been my best week yet; the big challenge now is getting my averages down.

  Play a few daily online games: Wordle, Connections, Keyword, Sudoku (all three levels).

• If I woke up really early, sometimes I’ll do a crossword puzzle; I have a great app on my iPad with more than 100 Sunday puzzles saved up and ready to go. (I don’t want to start my day before 6 AM unless I have something I need to do that early.)

By the time I do all that — the difficult level of Sudoku usually takes 25-50 minutes — my pups are ready to go out. If not, I wake them up and let them jump all over the bed, excited that we’re going to start our day. Then I throw on some clothes, take them outside (or for a walk, possibly on a leash if we’re on the boat or in the camper). When we get in, they usually go back to bed, but sometimes they wait by their dishes for food and I feed them and then they go back to bed. (Seriously: my dogs sleep a lot.)

Wordle

I have two Wordle buddies, Cheri (an old friend) and Teri (a neighbor). Every morning I play and send them my results. I have to use the Send Later feature on my phone so I don’t wake them. (Not everyone uses Do Not Disturb, although I don’t think I could live without it.)

Back when I had just one Wordle buddy, that buddy went on a trip to Europe and didn’t post her results. Because I didn’t get a text from her (and had not carved my morning routine in stone yet), I forgot to play and broke a 118-game streak. That really pissed me off. I’d rather just lose one day to break a streak than to break it by simply forgetting to play.

Then I started sharing results with Teri, too. I joke with her that it’s my proof of life. If she doesn’t get a Wordle text from me by noon, she should come make sure I’m not dead.

Connections & Sudoku

Connections and Sudoku are new to the routine. I used to play some Wordle-like puzzles that had me solving four or eight or even sixteen Wordles at once, but when Teri introduced me to Connections, I decided to mix things up a bit.

Connections gives you 16 words and you have to figure out how groups of four of them are related. It’s a lot tougher than it sounds, especially until you get the hang of it. I like it because it makes me think of each word in multiple ways. Because there’s no timer, there’s no stress. I get it 5 or 6 times a week. I think my longest streak was 6. That’s okay. I love the challenge.

I know that Sudoku has been around forever but I never got sucked in. I’d always seen it on paper and it looked like a lot of work. But then I discovered the digital version on the Washington Post website. It does the “pencil work” for you, leaving the task of using logic to fill in the grid. In the beginning, I didn’t fully understand the ways I could look at the pencil work and grid to logically deduce answers or eliminate possibilities. I found myself at a point where I’d have to guess, and I knew that wasn’t right. So I did some research and learned.

Here’s what today’s Sudoku looks like on the web. I usually play it on my iPad and it looks different, but not by much. I have what I call the “pencil work” showing. If I were doing this on paper, those little numbers would need to be manually penciled in (and erased) after scanning each row, column, or 3×3 grid to figure out what numbers are possible. The digital version keeps this updated, but at a certain point, I have to modify the pencil work to eliminate the little numbers using logic. That’s the part I like best.

Each day there are three puzzles: easy, medium, and difficult. The easy puzzle is painfully easy — I’m not sure why I bother with them. The medium puzzle is a good warmup for the difficult one. I love the way I can get to a point in the difficult puzzle where I seem stuck — and then use what I’ve learned to scan through the pencil work and eliminate possibilities. Then look at it all again and start getting answers.

I’m extremely pleased with this difficult Sudoku because it really makes me tap into my brain power and use logic. It forces me to focus. I know that I can solve the puzzle if I look at it in all these different logical ways. I’m really using my brain and I feel the challenge. I love it!

Solving Puzzles as a Diagnostic Tool

I think that my ability to solve difficult puzzles is what’s going to cue me in when I’m heading into cognitive decline. I live alone, so there’s no one around to tell me if I’m starting to slip mentally. It’s up to me to diagnose any possible problems. I look at the difficult Sudoku as my daily test to make sure my brain is still functioning. If I can’t solve the puzzle, I have a problem.

I know my short-term memory is getting bad. For example, I’ll solve the Wordle and text it to my two friends. Later, after 7 AM my time, I start getting their results. By that time — just an hour or two later! — I can’t remember what the answer word was, let alone the words I used to get it.

I don’t think my memory is a problem, at least not yet. I have tools and techniques to work around any short-term memory issues:

• I keep an open spiral notebook on my desk to write down things I need to remember for a day or two. I tear off the sheets when I no longer need the notes.
• I have a to-do list app on my phone, tablet, desktop computer, and laptop that automatically keeps the lists synced, so I can add items anytime, anywhere and have them available when I need them. I even use this for my shopping list and things I need to do 2 months from now, like changing the HVAC filter.
• As I mentioned elsewhere, I use Scrivener to take notes on things I need to remember long term that aren’t things I need to do, like the size, in pixels, of the featured image on my Great Loop blog — why can’t I remember that?) Those files are stored in a Dropbox folder so I can access them from any device, anywhere.

As things stand, I’m not worried about memory or cognitive issues. But I’m getting older and I need to be aware of the situation. I think my puzzle solving abilities will be a good indication of how things are.

I come up with a new goal and a business plan to go with it — and realize that this simply isn’t a good time to take risks.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you should know a little about me, but if you don’t, let me fill you in on what’s important to know for this post.

I’m currently 60-something. I retired from my most recent career as a helicopter pilot in 2023, after selling the helicopter, the charter company, and the cherry drying company in 2022 and 2023. I took the proceeds from those sales and used them to buy a 32-foot “pocket yacht,” which I shipped to Chicago in October 2022. I then spent most of the next two years cruising on that boat, alone and with friends, along the Great Loop. (I blog about that in my Great Loop blog, so if you’re interested, please check it out.)

I finished my Great Loop trip in August 2024 and trailered the boat back to the Seattle area, where I launched it in Puget sound. I then spent most of the next month cruising around there and the Inside Passage before bringing it home and cramming it into my very large garage for the winter.

In those final days on the Loop — keeping in mind that I covered more than 8,000 miles — I realized that the part of the Loop I liked the best was the northern part, say from New York City all the way up to Canada and then west into the Great Lakes. There’s nothing quite like cruising in the lakes, rivers, and canals of New York and Ontario; I felt that I could do it forever.

Here’s Do It Now anchored off Valcour Island in Lake Champlain in June 2024. I could spend a lifetime exploring the waterways of New York and Ontario.

Wouldn’t it be great to do it every summer until my age caught up with me and I was done boating?

Goals

I’m a person of personal goals and finishing the Great Loop left me kind of floundering without one. I also felt weird about being retired — not having anything to do to bring in a few bucks to cover my living expenses. I was living off my retirement savings, waiting a few more years to start collecting social security, and it didn’t look as if running out of money was going to be a problem. (I’m remarkably thrifty about some things.) Although my side gig as a silversmith did bring in some money, it was small change without the potential to get much bigger — unless I was willing to spend five days a week in my studio producing jewelry and a bunch of time finding new markets for my work. I wasn’t.

But when I finished the Loop I felt the inklings of a new goal coming on, a new business endeavor where I could spend eight months of the year cruising northern inland waters and the remaining four months soaking up the sun in Arizona. I’d use my captain’s license to offer one- and two-week cruises to a specific potential market of people, cruising in the waters I wanted to explore while teaching them what I knew about cruising. The money I brought in would cover my cruising expenses, reducing my cost of living and helping me preserve some of those retirement savings.

I’m Going to Need a Bigger Boat

But there was a catch: I needed a bigger boat.

I needed a boat with two full sleeping cabins. My guests would get the good one and I’d take the lesser one, but the lesser one had to be a lot bigger than the lesser one on my current boat. I needed to upsize and I had a few models in mind.

Of course, all of these bigger boat options, although pre-owned, would cost a significant amount of money. I figured I’d get that money by selling my home, which is fully paid for, and my current boat, which has a small loan. (I could go into a long lecture about having a paid-for home, but I won’t do it here.) I figured I’d put all of the boat proceeds and half the home proceeds into a bigger boat and use the rest of my home proceeds to buy a modest place in Tucson. After all, although I love my current home, I don’t like it nearly as much during the four months I’d be taking my annual break from the boat. Surely I wouldn’t miss it.

When I was in Arizona, I looked at homes and land and actually found two different lots that were perfect for me. One would be easier than the other to build on, but I’d still have to build on it. I built my current home, acting as General Contractor while the experts did the stuff requiring experts and I did the rest. Did I have another build in me? I thought maybe I did.

So all this is what was going through my mind when I cut this winter’s trip to Arizona short so I could attend the Seattle Boat Show. I had multiple goals for the show, but the main one was to look at used boats in the marina portion of the show. And I did. I actually found two models that would work perfectly for my new business.

The unfortunate thing was that they cost about 50% more than I was hoping to pay. Oops.

Okay, well maybe I could get a small business loan. I had good credit and could work up a business plan that would pass muster. My number-smart brain — did I mention I have an accounting degree? — went to work considering possibilities to make this happen.

How the Current Political Climate Stopped Me Cold

Meanwhile, the demented old narcissist that half the country thought should be the most powerful man in the world got sworn into office. (Did you notice how he didn’t touch the bible? I think he was afraid he’d burn his hand with the lightning God would send through it.)

And things got pretty weird pretty quick.

I won’t go into a litany of the weird shit the Orange Clown and his South African crony, the Space Karen, have subjected America and the world to. First of all, I couldn’t list it all. I stopped following the news. All I know are the things that have crept through my social media filters, things I’ve heard while I had my head in the sand and my fingers in my ears singing la, la, la, la, la at the top of my lungs.

And even that is enough.

More than enough.

More than enough to tell me that I’d be insane to invest time and money in a new business in this crazy political climate. Tariffs will result in inflation far beyond what we saw over the past few years. Job losses from the shutdown of government offices and the cancelling of grants will put people in dire straits. Another recession, which is definitely possible when the guy making laws by signing executive orders keeps making asinine decisions, will make it highly unlikely that anyone will want to pay me to take them on a cruise. (Unless there’s a chance I can smuggle them into Canada, I guess. If Canada even lets us in.)

More than enough to tell me that I’d be a complete and utter fool to walk away from a paid-for house to build a new one in the kind of economic uncertainty we face, where the price of lumber and building materials could jump 50% — if such materials were available at all. And in a red state? A place where the majority of people think calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America is a good thing that proves their cult leader has their best interests at heart? (How are those egg prices doing, my deplorable friends?) And how long before they cut our social security and medicare benefits — the exact thing most Americans in my age group are relying on to take care of them in their old age?

Am I nuts?

No.

So there won’t be a new business in my future. (Well, at least not one beyond the tiny business I started late last year and will talk about elsewhere.) There won’t be cruising in the freshwater lakes, rivers, and canals of New York and Ontario and beyond, at least not in a new-to-me, bigger boat. There won’t be a new house on five acres of desert land in the foothills of the Rincon Mountains near Tucson.

There will just be the financial security and comfort of the home I’m in now, a home I love eight months out of the year. I’ll keep myself busy enough.

And learn to be satisfied without chasing down another goal.

I still have that camper for a winter escape.

I start to think long and hard about my involvement in social media and whether it’s worth the time I spend on it. Maybe you should, too.

Back in the mid 2000s, I was at the height of my writing career. Churning out at least five books a year with two of them guaranteed bestsellers — well, “bestsellers” by tech book standards, anyway; I wasn’t arguing with my royalty checks — I was on the leading edge of so much end user level stuff. It seemed natural that I should dive into social media, which was so new at the time. I may have had an account on MySpace, but it was Twitter, which I joined in 2007, that really attracted me.

Twitter

Back then, it was possible to view the entire system timeline just by going to Twittr.com. (Yes, in the very early days, there was no E. That was a popular naming trend back then. Drop the E in front of the R. Tumblr is another example.) You’d just go to that home page, read the tweets of people all over the world, and pick out the accounts you wanted to follow. I still follow the first person I followed on Twitter — although I follow him on Mastodon now. (More on that in a moment.)

Twitter became an important part of my lifestyle. It was my “office watercooler,” so to speak. I worked alone at a home office, working long, 12-hour days while on a book project and then taking time off to recharge before the next one. My future wasband either worked from his home office or back on the East Coast or, later, from an office down in the Phoenix area. (In the end, it got to be a sort of “job of the month club” for him, bouncing from one job to another. At the very end, it was hard to keep track.) Since my work was mostly solitary, each time I came up from a highly focused writing session for a brief rest before diving back in, I looked for someone to talk to. If my future wasband was busy or not around, I turned to my Twitter friends.

I started to build real-life friendships with some of these people. I met a surprising number of them in person. In those days, I was still traveling a bit for work and would make a point of meeting up with ones who lived at my work destination. Coffee. Lunch. Whatever. These people were folks I could chat with online during the day, cutting a bit of the loneliness out of my workday. We chatted about all kinds of things, from the weather and photography to travel and cooking. Just about anything. (That’s one of the benefits of being a polymath: you can find something to talk about with almost anyone.)

Also, pretty early on, when I was still producing video content for Lynda.com (not LinkedIn Learning), I wrote the very first video courses — or training material at all — about using Twitter. I think I revised that course two times before they pulled it away from me and handed it to in-house authors they didn’t have to pay royalties to. (And that wasn’t the only successful course they snatched away from me to bring in-house. They also took my WordPress course, which was a real money-maker for me for several years. I guess you can see why I won’t develop courses for them anymore.)

Facebook

I also hopped onto Facebook around the same time, although my use of that service didn’t pick up until around 2010. I didn’t like it quite as much. It seemed juvenile. People posting sometimes idiotic, sometimes misleading memes created by others. There are only so many cat pictures a person can look at in a day. Not many original thoughts being shared. Actually, not much of anything that could be considered a “thought.” It also upset me to learn that several real-world friends and family members appeared to have Nazi leanings. Do I really need to know that? Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.

And then there was the time my sister, a life-long Republican, posted a pro-Democrat sentiment on her Facebook wall. My mother, in her infinite wisdom, had the nerve to lecture my sister, right there on Facebook for everyone to see. My sister deleted my mother’s comment and stopped talking to her for a while. I just blocked my mother. Who needs to worry about shit like that?

LinkedIn

I might have hopped on LinkedIn before Facebook. In the beginning, LinkedIn looked like a serious social networking website where I might actually make connections to people who could move my careers forward. (Yes, back then I had two active careers: writing and flying helicopters.) But I never had any success making solid professional contacts there and couldn’t see any reason to duplicate personal content I was already sharing on other social media. And then the spam began; it got to the point that every time I connected to LinkedIn, the only new content directed to me was spam from people claiming to know someone I barely knew or had heard of, trying to sell me on their services.

In fact, sometime between 2010 and 2014, I started to realize that actively participating in three social media sites — Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn — was taking a lot of time and effort. More than I wanted to give. LinkedIn was mostly abandoned; I killed the account completely when the spam started arriving in my email inbox and I couldn’t seem to shut it off.

Instagram, TikTok, others

Fortunately, I never got sucked into Instagram, like so many other folks have, although I think I did set up at least once account. Again, I felt my hands were already full with the social media I “had” to be on. I did not want to lose more hours of my day building a presence somewhere else.

Ditto for TikTok — most of the content I’ve seen there is amateurish, juvenile, or both. I think TikTok is the perfect platform for today’s vapid population of low attention span, gullible people. I do believe China is (or will be) using it to sway popular opinion. It won’t surprise me at all if it works. Anyone willing to waste hours of their day on the kind of crap the algorithm serves them — no matter how “good” that algorithm is at predicting what people like — is already being led around by a leash.

Social Media and the Publishing World

Anyway, my publishers were thrilled that I had a social media presence. That presence was enhanced quite a bit when I earned a “verified” checkmark on my Twitter account. (Back in the day, verified meant that they’d checked your identity and you were who they said you were. Twitter only performed this service for people with a certain level of fame, which I’d achieved at the time through my writing. Heck, for a while I even had a Wikipedia page.)

Keep in mind, this is still before the word influencer began being used. Authors at my level weren’t influencers yet — and I don’t think I ever was one. But readers — potential and otherwise — could find us online and be “friends” with us. We could post about our work and people who followed us could learn about it. All without costing the publishers a single cent of their advertising budgets. All the work fell to the authors and it sometimes was quite a bit of work.

And this is how things remain today in the publishing world. Part of the author evaluation process is an examination of the author’s social media reach and content. It’s crazy because it forces authors to build an online presence that takes them away from their actual work. It also limits what an author can say on social media — one unpopular tweet can land an author in seriously hot water. (And I’m sure I could find at least six good examples of this, but since I’m writing this in the middle of the California desert with no cell signal, I can’t look now.)

2015 to 2022

Let’s fast-forward to the mid 2010s. By this point, I was pretty much addicted to participation in social media, including Twitter and Facebook. (I’d mostly given up on LinkedIn by then.)

My writing career had wound down — who buys computer how-to books these days? — and my flying career had taken off (no pun intended). I was happily divorced, living in a home I had built to my specifications on 10 acres of view property in Washington state. I was exploring new hobbies like beekeeping and, later, silversmithing. I had a great garden. I had a little jet boat I’d take out on the Columbia River. I had real-life friends who lived nearby in addition to my social media friends.

The need to keep my publishers happy by maintaining a social media presence had pretty much faded away. But still, I was spending hours every day with my nose in my phone or iPad, scrolling through Twitter and Facebook, clicking Like buttons and Retweet buttons and replying to posts I had something to say about.

It was around then that I started to realize that Facebook wasn’t showing me all of the posts by all of the people I followed. It was showing me a selection of them. If I went to the person’s wall — do they still call it that? — I would see what they’d posted, but I had no patience to do that for everyone I wanted to keep up with.

The posts that seemed to come up the most were political memes. Holy crap! How many hateful, usually misleading memes are out there? Are people so freaking stupid that they can’t comprehend a thought unless it’s 25 words or less in big type on a picture?

And then there were the ads. They never seemed to stop. But when they started showing me ads related to things I’d searched for on Google, I completely wigged out. Facebook was tracking my activity across the Internet and using that info to display advertisements for things it thought I might like. This had to stop.

In the meantime, Twitter grew exponentially and became the platform of choice for the news media to quote. Not a day went by when a television newscast didn’t include at least one tweet.

And then I noticed that tweets weren’t appearing in the reverse chronological order I loved. And that tweets were missing. Twitter, like Facebook, was employing an algorithm that determined what it would show me and what order that content would appear in. Among ads. I found myself repeatedly going into settings to revert back to the chronological timeline of all the tweets by people I followed.

In the perfectly coined word by Cory Doctorow, social media — all social media — was becoming enshittified. After getting us addicted to their platforms, they were adding crappy “features” no one wanted to display advertising, change opinions, and collect information about us that they could sell to third parties. You know what they say: nothing is free. If you’re using a free service, maybe you’re the product they’re selling to someone else.

I knew what was going on and I didn’t want to be part of it. Something had to give.

After staying off Facebook for a whole year, I decided to delete my account. The hardest part about it was not losing touch with the few real friends I had there. It was knowing that the hours I’d spent participating on the service, giving them content that they might or might not show to the people who followed me, was time ultimately wasted. All that content would be deleted. Gone for good. (At least I hope so.)

I was down to just one social media account: Twitter.

2022 and Beyond

My love affair — fueled, in part by addiction — for Twitter soured considerably when the Space Karen, Elon Musk, bought it. It didn’t take long for him to try to monetize it by allowing people to pay for a “verified” check mark and trying to force those of us who already had one to pay up to keep it. I elected not to pay and found myself suddenly unverified. I was no longer who I said I was?

I saw the way things were going — although I admit I never expected it to get as bad as it did. I set up an account on Mastodon, an open source platform that networks servers around the world, very much like the old Fidonet network my BBS was part of in the mid 1990s. Over time, I weaned myself off of Twitter and onto Mastodon. I fully expected it to meet my “watercooler” needs, bringing me a handful of friends I could chat with online no matter where I was.

Mastodon reminded me of Twitter when I first joined. No algorithm. Posts appear in reverse chronological order. I see every toot by everyone I follow — unless, of course, I blocked certain words or phrases with filters. I currently use filters extensively on Mastodon to block out as much political content as possible. I don’t need to follow politics on social media, where memes and desperate pleas attached to article links fill our minds with so much oversimplified crap.

When I learned my Twitter content was being used to feed AI systems, I wanted my 150,000+ tweets off Twitter. I paid TweetDeleter to do the job for me. Due to constraints on the Twitter platform, it took two months.

I set up Mastodon to automatically delete toots after a year. I had realized that nothing I shared online was so important that it needed to be kept forever. Life is fleeting, social media life is even more fleeting.

And this is where I am now:

• I still have my Twitter account. I have to hold onto the user name so no one else gets it and tries to impersonate me. (Yes, it has happened before.) But I rarely look at it and, if you looked at it now, it would tell you to find me on Mastodon.
• I participate throughout the day every day on Mastodon. Am I addicted? Sadly, I believe so.

My Current State of Dissatisfaction

And that brings me to the point of this post.

You see, even though I believe that Mastodon is my best option for participating in social media — keeping in mind that my solitary lifestyle gives me a need for the always attended “watercooler” for chatting with others — I’m finding myself less and less satisfied with it. Simply said, I don’t think it’s meeting my real need, which is thoughtful or amusing conversation.

If I wanted a distraction, I’d look at YouTube or do a crossword puzzle. Or, for Pete’s sake, work on one of my hobbies. (Did I mention that I recently started linocut and bookbinding? It never ends.)

But it’s not just distraction I want. I want meaningful conversation with intelligent people who don’t get bent out of shape if you don’t fully agree with everything they toot. People who aren’t sucked into current events so deeply that all they can do is whine about the current political landscape and share idiotic memes. People who can share a joke or provide insight about something I mentioned or share their own interesting experiences. People who aren’t so focused on the illusion of being a better human that all they can do is toot about the latest catastrophe or outrage that should make us sad or angry or frustrated and boost the toots of every out-of-luck user begging for money. People who don’t hate.

Am I getting that on Mastodon? Yes, to a certain extent. I fine-tune the accounts I follow daily, cutting out the ones who toot things I don’t want to see and turning off boosts for the ones who share everything they like, regardless of its more universal appeal. (The theory these people cling to is that they’re doing the original posters a favor by sharing instead of liking since there’s no algorithm to give them exposure. What they don’t realize is that they become one of thousands of algorithms, and that by sharing nearly everything, they’re filling our feeds with too much stuff.

I can count on two hands the accounts I interact with — keeping in mind that the only thing I want from social media is interaction. The rest is a steady stream of photographs that may or may not have been taken by the person who originally posted it. (I recently blocked the Pixelfed instance and that really cut back on the flood of photos. Enough remain.) And don’t get me started on the holier-than-thou mavens who find it necessary to tell us all how to toot and include alt text and use hashtags. I tell people how to mute and block people like that. ;-)

In general, however, social media is not serving me what I want to be served. It’s not filling the socialization gap in my life that’s inherent with living or traveling alone in a relatively remote area. And that’s got me wondering why I waste so much time on it.

The Solution

The solution is easy:

• Cut back on social media use. I’ve tried before but will try again to limit my access to social media to 7 PM to 7 AM. In other words, no scrolling during the day. I’m also going to try to limit all access to less than one hour a day.
• Continue to fine-tune the list of people I follow to dump the ones who share stuff I don’t care about and don’t interact with me and replace them with more interesting people. (I’ve been doing that a lot lately.)
• Turn off boosts (like a retweet or share) for the people who share a lot of crap I don’t want to see.
• Continue to fine-tune my filters to block out content I don’t want to see. These days, it’s pretty much anything to do with politics, war, gender and race issues, gaming, and programming. I figure that I already see just a fraction of what the people I follow post because of my extensive filtering. That’s fine with me.

While I don’t think any of these things will make my participation in social media more satisfying, I do believe that it’ll help break my addiction (because of less access) and help keep it from getting any more disappointing than it actually is.

The next step, of course, is dropping out of this last social media platform and staying off social media completely. But I don’t think I’m quite ready for that yet.

In the meantime, what do you think about your participation in social media? Is it giving you everything you want to need? Are you satisfied? Do you feel as if you’re using your social media time productively or wasting it?