Changes at 40,000 ft

Lots of things have been changing for me lately, mostly by my choosing. While I believe this is a good thing, I feel an increasing sense of disarray. My life, my goals, my plans, and even my thoughts, are beginning to feel more and more like the seemingly endless, and increasingly disorganized list of projects and tasks in OmniFocus (the application I use for managing tasks/projects).

Maybe I'm just trying to do too much at once. Maybe I need to slow down, define a few short-term reachable goals and stick with them until they're met. Or, maybe, it's time to take another 40,000 ft look at my life.

Going Cold Turkey on Coffee

Coffee is the one thing that I have tried to quit several times over the past few years and failed (it's been my new years resolution several years in a row). Failing is not like me. If I want to quit something, I just do it. I've never been addicted to anything in my life... except coffee.

I started drinking coffee with cream and sugar when I was 16. When I got into fitness a few years later, I slowly decreased the amount of cream and sugar in the coffee until it was black. From that point on, cream and sugar in my coffee ruined it for me so I continued to drink it black.

The average cup of black coffee contains between 115-175mg of caffeine. More than 300mg of caffeine a day on regular basis has been shown to cause several negative side effects, including increased urination (and dehydration as a result), disruption of normal diet (drinking coffee when hungry makes you no longer feel hungry, even though your body needs food), headaches, irritation, and mood swings. I have experienced all of these, but I'm only now beginning to realize how much they're affecting my fitness and overall health.

I recognized a pattern in my coffee consumption. Over a three month time span, I would go from drinking 1 cup to 4 cups of coffee per day. Eventually I would feel so sick of the high caffeine intake (or its side effects) that I would drop back down to 1 cup a day, only to begin the process all over again. Here's a chart of what I'm talking about:

Cups of Coffee Per Day

For some reason I've felt extremely motivated and strong about the fitness goals I set for this year, so since I'm on a roll I decided to go cold turkey on coffee last Tuesday (February 17th). The first few days were rough. Tuesday the bad headaches started. Wednesday the headaches were slightly better, but the mood swings crept in (mood swings are rare for me, so it was easy for me to recognize them). Thursday it was a combination of mood swings and headaches but by Friday the side effects were starting to wear off.

I had considered leaving the weekends open for one or two coffees, but I remembered when I did that in the past it resulted in eventually making exceptions during the week. I almost gave in on Saturday, almost. Today is Sunday and I can already feel my desire for coffee is slowly but surely wearing off. I feel so much better overall. I'm able to wake up easier in the morning, I'm spending less, my diet and digestion are better, and I don't feel this constant need for something external to keep me going.

The Pursuit of Knowledge

I started writing this as a comment in reply to Adam Bossy's post The Paradox of Self-Education. The comment became so long that I decided to turn it into a post here on my blog.

I grew up wanting to "be everything", from astronomer, to musician, to entomologist, to geneticist, to Navy SEAL, to writer, to geologist, to computer scientist. Hell, even meteorology (the study of weather, i.e., what the weather man does) fascinated me! I was home schooled through high school and never spent a single day in public or private school. (I actually ended up teaching myself through high school because my parents were busy teaching my younger brother and sister.) This gave me great freedom to study anything that happened to interest me. Over the course of a year, I probably switched between being totally engrossed in a dozen different fields. But in my teens, I realized that "being everything" wasn't a career path and just knowing a little bit about many different fields wasn't going to pay the bills. So I picked the most developed of my skills and went into IT.

Now at 26 and no college degree, I'm working for a software start-up doing a whole variety of things (programming, sysadmin, tech support, editor, you name it) and I run my own small but successful web hosting company. My interest in many other fields has not changed or decreased in any way. The only thing that has changed is my ability to spend ANY amount of time exploring them.

While pondering many of the same points as Adam does in his post, I came to the conclusion that it's our bills and our standards of living that are holding us down. By living paycheck to paycheck we make it impossible to take six months or a year off from work to explore some new thing that has peaked our interest. Socially, we're expected to follow the same routine advancement in our current field from one position to another, making a bigger paycheck and being able to raise our standard of living that much higher (thereby putting us back to where we started and resulting in yet another desire for a raise and advancement).

I went from spending upwards of $2,500 a month down to $800 a month by making lifestyle adjustments. "Do I need cable TV?" No, I have the Internet. "Do I need this two-bedroom, 1,500 sqft apartment?" No, I'm a single guy and the rent is a huge part of my paycheck -- 400 sqft will do. "Do I need to drive into work?" No, I can take public transportation. "Do I need this $5 coffee every day?" No, a $.50 green tea will suffice and it will be healthier.

My goal now is to continue living frugally so I can set aside a big enough bucket of money to get me through one year without work. Then, when the time is right, I'll spend a year learning something of interest, possibly making small amounts of money on the side. When needed, I'll start working and hopefully keep repeating this process. If something I do makes me tons of money, great. If not... well it's not about the money.

The pursuit of knowledge is to me more important than all the money in the world. Sure, money would make that pursuit easier, but life isn't easy. This is where I feel society gets it wrong. We put money and status first and education and knowledge second, using the latter to obtain the former. Imagine a society where the pursuit of knowledge defined our standards of living. (Oh no, what would happen to all the ads?!)

If we're willing to sacrifice our high-strung lifestyle for the ability to spend time learning and increasing knowledge, then we can accomplish amazing things, both individually and as a society. A world pursuing money and status has all the reason to fight amongst themselves and start wars, but a world pursuing knowledge and advancement has all the reason to maintain peace.