ebaudry
09-30-2005, 09:37 PM
I came to write down these ideas in response to mason55's post in OOT called "Creating meaning in my life". I decided to start this thread here for a couple reasons. Firstly this forum seems to deal with these types of issues more than OOT does. Second, and quite coincidentally, the morning after I wrote the second response, I received an email from my old college advisor / econ teacher. He told me about a seminar being held for graduating seniors of the economics department in which a few alumni would speak for 15-20 minutes each about their paths after graduation, tying in how economics and their education affected their choices. He didn't know at the time that I quit my finance job and have since been focusing on sustainabilty and playing poker. /images/graemlins/smile.gif
I feel like it's a fantastic opportunity, and if someone had said to me, when I was 22, what I might say to these kids, it could have had a profound effect on my choices in the following years. I realize that I have a responsibility to share something worthwhile with these people.
After my first post I received quite some feedback, both in the thread, and through PM, which has prompted me to think about all this stuff in a more lucid and reasoned sort of way.
So, if you would, please consider the following and reply with any questions, suggestions, criticisms, etc. so that I can both think it over myself, and incorporate it into what I decide to share with the students.
Thanks a lot,
Eric
______
Mason55's Post:
Ok, this isn't like a QLC post here. I'm not depressed or anything. But here's my story.
I'm 22, living alone in DC. I have a good job, as in, it pays the bills. I'm a programmer for the DoD. Now, let me tell you, it's not a very fulfilling job. Bascially, I help the military kill as many people as possible. I am very good at what I do, but I can't see myself being a programmer forever. I'm planning to go back to school (law or finance maybe, if I'm going to be miserable then I might as well make a lot of money), but until then I would like to do something else that will provide me with fulfillment (and maybe help meet some cute girls?)
I don't know, what do other people do besides work and play TV? I work out after work, go out drinking with my friends, play poker and video games, all that jazz.
Give me some suggestions.
PS: Flame away
________
1st Reply:
When I was 26 (a year ago), I came to the realization that the only thing that you can possibly ever accomplish in life is to be happy. It's the best thing you can do for you and its a tremendous gift to everyone around you when you are doing everything you can to feel happy and good about yourself.
It can be very difficult to figure out what makes you happy, but I would suggest removing from your life sources of "manufactured desires" meaning basically not watching TV (or at the very least not watching commercials), taking control over how you react to the various imposed media around, meditating would be a great idea (but most people are too lazy... its a vast understatement to say the rewards outweigh the "cost" of energy). Removing yourself from those imposed wants is the "easiest" way to free up your conciousness. Then your mind will see much more clearly what you personally want, and will be able to better tune out the things that companies, parents, governments, cultures etc are telling you that you should want.
I left the finance field so i can't really suggest going that route. No bombs going on, but the way you can mess with people using money is pretty atrocious too.
I'd try to meet new people as much as possible. If you think about it most (all?) of the opportunities that come into your life are through other people. Also that shared community is one of the keys towards avoiding depression.
Philosophically speaking, I would recommend to try and realize that you don't need anything outside yourself to be happy. You don't need good work, you don't need nice stuff, you don't need to live somewhere expensive. You just need whatever it takes to make yourself happy and at peace. And with a little effort you will find that what you want is completely under your control. The desires that make you feel unhappy or ill-at-ease right now can be unlearned/reprogrammed if you are willing to try. It takes a long time to undo "mental habits", but the potential reward is so valuable that making "lot of money" seems like a waste of time. If you find that you enjoy making money, then by all means go for it. But almost everyone who sets great wealth as their goal, ends up really wondering why at some point later in life. Some because they realize how difficult and far away "a lot of money" can be, and some because they get as much money as they ever wanted and find it doesn't provide for them at all what they anticipated. For most people it is a severe burden.
Anyway if you want to philosophilize at some point, pm me or something.
If you enjoy reading (or listening to books on CD), then you might check out "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle. He was the first writer that I personally found to discuss conciousness and presence and how to use them to transform your life into a joyous experience, bringing great relief to all the "problems" that our overly-active little monkey brains are capable of providing.
Best o' luck
_____________
2nd Reply:
Someone asked me a little about how I apply the ideas I mentioned in my last post. I thought I would share my reply here in case its of interest to anyone else.
_________
I'm really glad that you got something out of my post, I wondered at the time if anyone would care, but decided it would be good for me to write it anyway.
Putting those concepts into practice is (for me at least) very difficult. It requires rejecting most of my youth's patterns and especially being very mindful about where my beliefs and habits come from. I have been realizing over the past few years how so much of my assumptions about how the world works and how people relate to each other are based upon sit-coms, marketing directed at fueling my desires, and just general unconciousness where I have taken as "fact" my observations of some key few relationships (mother-father, me-father, me-mother, siblings, significant others).
Those patterns and habits are it turns out are largely focused towards keeping me entrenched in whatever situation I find myself, whether good or bad. Simply my behaviors are very often based around avoiding change, minimizing perceived risk, taking the easy path, and so on.
I have been making huge "sacrifices" to pursue my new vision of peace and happiness not derived from material wealth. You may be finding the same things as I did: My v.expensive house didn't make me happy, neither did my BMW, or eating out at nice restaurants and taking expensive trips. I feel naive admitting it now, but I truly believed that each of those things were going to make me happier. I believed (mostly from my Dad and from Finance Profs) that once I had a lot of money everything else would fall in line. The reality was very different. I would liken my experience to a tolerance. It was taking more and more money to "get my fix" ($50 used to be a lot of money, then $500, then $5,000, you get the idea), and I had access to basically as much money as I wanted.
So I decided to re-evaluate everything in my life based on the idea: What would I create in my life if I believed I had the ability to put anything I want in it? So my now ex-wife and I started working on the issues that plagued our relationship and realized that we would be better off and happier with other people (me with another conciousness-minded person, her with a different yuppy, so to speak). I gave her our house, sold my car, quit my job and went about trying to live a better, more peaceful life with less money.
So now I try to think of myself as not so different from a monkey (in opposition to the dominant paradigm that acts as if the planet, all animals and plants are here for our personal amusement). I differ from a monkey primarily in the level of conciousness I display, and frankly I'm a bit jealous of the monkeys since my brain keeps me a little too busy for my taste. That shift in the way I interact with the world adds a lot of humor and easy-going-ness to my life since all us human-monkeys act in such ridiculous ways (myself included). Before I do anything, or start any new project, I try to think about what part of me wants to do it, and if its in line with my happiness goals. So work-wise, I realized that there is no activity, no matter how interesting or fulfilling, that I can do happily for 40+ hrs per week. I can't even do the things I love for that long for any significant length of time. So I decided to try out the 'what would you do with your time if you won the lotto' idea. The answer for me is shockingly simple (once the t.v./marketing derived desires are set aside): I want to sleep as much as I want, at whatever times I want. I want to spend a lot of my time with friends and making new ones. I want to spend a lot of time reading and learning, but on my own pace, sometimes spending all day doing that, sometimes going for weeks without. I want to partake of hobbies that I enjoy, like poker, pot, hanging out, philosophizing, walking around, mtn. biking, etc. I want to give back to my family a little bit to feel like I am balanced towards them. I want to help my 24 y.o. sister enter the "adult world". And I want to help do my part to keep western civilization from poisoning the planet to such an extent that I can't go outside or drink water anymore
Then on the practical side, I need some money to pay rent, car insurance, food and so on. So I tried to figure out how to make money doing what I wanted to do anyway. This is really a very key concept. The result of it is that I never feel like I have to work. The idea of work is actually starting to be a little fuzzy in my head. That said, I do a lot, and many others would call it working, but is it really? I would do those things whether or not there was money in it, and I do it whenever I want. True there is a lot less money being made now than before (about 25k/yr or less, vs. 100k/yr or more before), but along with these shifts, I have really started to care less about the material side of things. I still have a car, party a lot, go on trips and so on, but I now view my car as transportation rather than as a toy, I party in cheaper ways (more pot, less bars), and my trips are cartrips to SF or wherever instead of flying to France or Amsterdam.
So the money these days comes from activities that fit into the above wants. I want to help my family so I do handyman work at my sister's house and act as a financial planner for my dad. I love games, especially poker, so I read everything I could find on how to make money doing that and am currently trying. (4-tabling $20+2 STT for $500-$2000/month). I want to help the environment so I started a non-profit called Sustainable Home Improvement in order to help homeowners make environmentally sound decisions when they remodel or upgrade their homes. Basically I try to keep my activites varied so I don't get bored (which my overly active brain likes to do if I spend too much time "working"). I end up playing poker about 20hrs/wk, helping my dad 1-2hrs/week, fixing my sisters place 1-2hrs/wk, sleeping 8-10hrs/night, and doing about 1 hour a week of trivial to-do list type stuff. If I needed more money, I would start examining other habits or interests I have and perhaps try to write something, tutor some kids in Algebra, or make a porn website, or anything else that seems neat anyway that might make some money.
There are some things that I am irreversibly giving up though, and I just have to be ok with that. I won't ever be able to buy a house on my own in L.A.. Not really a problem since I see moving to Portland or Vancouver at some point, but still its a "loss". I also am eliminating at least 90% of the dating pool since traditional values are still running strong there. I won't be taking care of a housewife, or sending my kids to a private college, but I don't beleive in "taking care" of other people financially, and think the tuition spent on school is many fold more expensive than its value. I have learned way more from my own reading time than I did in the classroom.
The net result though is a simple and peaceful life. I don't have to worry anymore about what my best available balance transfer credit card offer is. I don't worry what others think about me b/c I don't rely on them for a job, social structure, or anything else. And anyway, most people I know think I'm a little crazy for most of my beliefs. But they also knew me 2-years ago when I was a married yuppy trying to take over the company I worked for.
Anyway, I probably left out a lot, but hopefully I drew the broad strokes. Life is incredibly short and I won't spend it doing what others think is best for me. It's difficult at times (especially around LA) not feeling like people value the same things as I do, but its a small price to pay for my freedom.
-Eric
____________
3rd Reply:
Says captZEEbo1: "vn post. Just out of curiosity, do you think you'll be this way the rest of your life, or do you see yourself going back to the corporate world again someday? "
That is a mighty difficult question. I suppose the simple and honest answer is: I don't know. My instincts tell me the shift is permanent. Certainly specific aspects will flex if or when I decide to have a family, or perhaps as rising health care costs require either more money or a decreased comfort level.
The principle that I would refer to as a general response would be: I will always do what I perceive to be in my best interests. Given my particular life experiences, parents, educations, and so on, I presently believe that happiness and peace are the best things for me to create in my life. I also believe that I have the ability (read: am learning the ability) to manifest in my life those circumstances and choices that offer me maximized peace and happiness, when I consciously make the effort.
The challenge for me, and I would imagine for most people, is to maintain that level of energy and focus that is required to manifest good situations in my life. In my particular case, given my particular likes and wants, I need to go out to parks, events, and parties regularly in order to keep meeting new people. This takes quite a bit of energy, and the return on my investment is often spaced out quite far (5-10+ outings to find truly meaningful friendships, variance is a bitch) so I have to maintain a level of faith that my continuous effort pays off. Similar to "the long-run" in poker, I stay focused on the goals of peace and happiness and then at any given moment try to make little choices that lead in that direction instead of away from it. It is often very easy to tell which decision leads towards my goals and which lead away, the difficulty lies in maintaining enough presence to care enough about getting what I want. Lazyness can be the largest impediment to this, often because my mind plays tricks on me, like "you don't need to brush your teeth tonight, you have been really good about it recently". Weird "logic" that sometimes does manage to persuade me. So my big goals of peace and happiness yield a meta-goal: Each time a small choice arises, leading either towards or away from the big goals, try to choose the option that I will be happy and peaceful towards In other words, using the teeth example, I try to choose the option that I can't argue with - I know that if I just go and brush my teeth I will be happier (more self-esteem, less dental bills, more will power, and so forth).
So tying this all back into the original question "do you think you'll be this way the rest of your life, or do you see yourself going back to the corporate world again someday?", I will only return if the sum of the choices I encounter each inarguably lead me there, and those choices are themselves imbued with peace and happiness. So my instincts say "no" because I can pretty clearly remember the types of ingrained beliefs I had to undo to finally leave that world. For example I would have to choose someday that I would prefer to get up early and go to bed accordingly (something I have never, even in school, been able to enjoy). I would have to choose to spend the majority of my time at an office, rather than with my friends/wife/kids/pets/etc. I would have to choose to allocate the planet's resources towards wealth creation instead of towards increasing biodiversity and health.
I made those types of choices easily when I was on autopilot from a finance education, but now that I understand the consequences of those choices... why would I choose to do something that brings me unhappiness and dis-ease?
As an aside, I appreciate all the feedback I have been getting on this stuff, it has been very useful for me to put down in words some of the stuff that is floating around in my head. It also has made me feel much more connected to the community around me to know that some other people are thinking about this too.
-Eric
I feel like it's a fantastic opportunity, and if someone had said to me, when I was 22, what I might say to these kids, it could have had a profound effect on my choices in the following years. I realize that I have a responsibility to share something worthwhile with these people.
After my first post I received quite some feedback, both in the thread, and through PM, which has prompted me to think about all this stuff in a more lucid and reasoned sort of way.
So, if you would, please consider the following and reply with any questions, suggestions, criticisms, etc. so that I can both think it over myself, and incorporate it into what I decide to share with the students.
Thanks a lot,
Eric
______
Mason55's Post:
Ok, this isn't like a QLC post here. I'm not depressed or anything. But here's my story.
I'm 22, living alone in DC. I have a good job, as in, it pays the bills. I'm a programmer for the DoD. Now, let me tell you, it's not a very fulfilling job. Bascially, I help the military kill as many people as possible. I am very good at what I do, but I can't see myself being a programmer forever. I'm planning to go back to school (law or finance maybe, if I'm going to be miserable then I might as well make a lot of money), but until then I would like to do something else that will provide me with fulfillment (and maybe help meet some cute girls?)
I don't know, what do other people do besides work and play TV? I work out after work, go out drinking with my friends, play poker and video games, all that jazz.
Give me some suggestions.
PS: Flame away
________
1st Reply:
When I was 26 (a year ago), I came to the realization that the only thing that you can possibly ever accomplish in life is to be happy. It's the best thing you can do for you and its a tremendous gift to everyone around you when you are doing everything you can to feel happy and good about yourself.
It can be very difficult to figure out what makes you happy, but I would suggest removing from your life sources of "manufactured desires" meaning basically not watching TV (or at the very least not watching commercials), taking control over how you react to the various imposed media around, meditating would be a great idea (but most people are too lazy... its a vast understatement to say the rewards outweigh the "cost" of energy). Removing yourself from those imposed wants is the "easiest" way to free up your conciousness. Then your mind will see much more clearly what you personally want, and will be able to better tune out the things that companies, parents, governments, cultures etc are telling you that you should want.
I left the finance field so i can't really suggest going that route. No bombs going on, but the way you can mess with people using money is pretty atrocious too.
I'd try to meet new people as much as possible. If you think about it most (all?) of the opportunities that come into your life are through other people. Also that shared community is one of the keys towards avoiding depression.
Philosophically speaking, I would recommend to try and realize that you don't need anything outside yourself to be happy. You don't need good work, you don't need nice stuff, you don't need to live somewhere expensive. You just need whatever it takes to make yourself happy and at peace. And with a little effort you will find that what you want is completely under your control. The desires that make you feel unhappy or ill-at-ease right now can be unlearned/reprogrammed if you are willing to try. It takes a long time to undo "mental habits", but the potential reward is so valuable that making "lot of money" seems like a waste of time. If you find that you enjoy making money, then by all means go for it. But almost everyone who sets great wealth as their goal, ends up really wondering why at some point later in life. Some because they realize how difficult and far away "a lot of money" can be, and some because they get as much money as they ever wanted and find it doesn't provide for them at all what they anticipated. For most people it is a severe burden.
Anyway if you want to philosophilize at some point, pm me or something.
If you enjoy reading (or listening to books on CD), then you might check out "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle. He was the first writer that I personally found to discuss conciousness and presence and how to use them to transform your life into a joyous experience, bringing great relief to all the "problems" that our overly-active little monkey brains are capable of providing.
Best o' luck
_____________
2nd Reply:
Someone asked me a little about how I apply the ideas I mentioned in my last post. I thought I would share my reply here in case its of interest to anyone else.
_________
I'm really glad that you got something out of my post, I wondered at the time if anyone would care, but decided it would be good for me to write it anyway.
Putting those concepts into practice is (for me at least) very difficult. It requires rejecting most of my youth's patterns and especially being very mindful about where my beliefs and habits come from. I have been realizing over the past few years how so much of my assumptions about how the world works and how people relate to each other are based upon sit-coms, marketing directed at fueling my desires, and just general unconciousness where I have taken as "fact" my observations of some key few relationships (mother-father, me-father, me-mother, siblings, significant others).
Those patterns and habits are it turns out are largely focused towards keeping me entrenched in whatever situation I find myself, whether good or bad. Simply my behaviors are very often based around avoiding change, minimizing perceived risk, taking the easy path, and so on.
I have been making huge "sacrifices" to pursue my new vision of peace and happiness not derived from material wealth. You may be finding the same things as I did: My v.expensive house didn't make me happy, neither did my BMW, or eating out at nice restaurants and taking expensive trips. I feel naive admitting it now, but I truly believed that each of those things were going to make me happier. I believed (mostly from my Dad and from Finance Profs) that once I had a lot of money everything else would fall in line. The reality was very different. I would liken my experience to a tolerance. It was taking more and more money to "get my fix" ($50 used to be a lot of money, then $500, then $5,000, you get the idea), and I had access to basically as much money as I wanted.
So I decided to re-evaluate everything in my life based on the idea: What would I create in my life if I believed I had the ability to put anything I want in it? So my now ex-wife and I started working on the issues that plagued our relationship and realized that we would be better off and happier with other people (me with another conciousness-minded person, her with a different yuppy, so to speak). I gave her our house, sold my car, quit my job and went about trying to live a better, more peaceful life with less money.
So now I try to think of myself as not so different from a monkey (in opposition to the dominant paradigm that acts as if the planet, all animals and plants are here for our personal amusement). I differ from a monkey primarily in the level of conciousness I display, and frankly I'm a bit jealous of the monkeys since my brain keeps me a little too busy for my taste. That shift in the way I interact with the world adds a lot of humor and easy-going-ness to my life since all us human-monkeys act in such ridiculous ways (myself included). Before I do anything, or start any new project, I try to think about what part of me wants to do it, and if its in line with my happiness goals. So work-wise, I realized that there is no activity, no matter how interesting or fulfilling, that I can do happily for 40+ hrs per week. I can't even do the things I love for that long for any significant length of time. So I decided to try out the 'what would you do with your time if you won the lotto' idea. The answer for me is shockingly simple (once the t.v./marketing derived desires are set aside): I want to sleep as much as I want, at whatever times I want. I want to spend a lot of my time with friends and making new ones. I want to spend a lot of time reading and learning, but on my own pace, sometimes spending all day doing that, sometimes going for weeks without. I want to partake of hobbies that I enjoy, like poker, pot, hanging out, philosophizing, walking around, mtn. biking, etc. I want to give back to my family a little bit to feel like I am balanced towards them. I want to help my 24 y.o. sister enter the "adult world". And I want to help do my part to keep western civilization from poisoning the planet to such an extent that I can't go outside or drink water anymore
Then on the practical side, I need some money to pay rent, car insurance, food and so on. So I tried to figure out how to make money doing what I wanted to do anyway. This is really a very key concept. The result of it is that I never feel like I have to work. The idea of work is actually starting to be a little fuzzy in my head. That said, I do a lot, and many others would call it working, but is it really? I would do those things whether or not there was money in it, and I do it whenever I want. True there is a lot less money being made now than before (about 25k/yr or less, vs. 100k/yr or more before), but along with these shifts, I have really started to care less about the material side of things. I still have a car, party a lot, go on trips and so on, but I now view my car as transportation rather than as a toy, I party in cheaper ways (more pot, less bars), and my trips are cartrips to SF or wherever instead of flying to France or Amsterdam.
So the money these days comes from activities that fit into the above wants. I want to help my family so I do handyman work at my sister's house and act as a financial planner for my dad. I love games, especially poker, so I read everything I could find on how to make money doing that and am currently trying. (4-tabling $20+2 STT for $500-$2000/month). I want to help the environment so I started a non-profit called Sustainable Home Improvement in order to help homeowners make environmentally sound decisions when they remodel or upgrade their homes. Basically I try to keep my activites varied so I don't get bored (which my overly active brain likes to do if I spend too much time "working"). I end up playing poker about 20hrs/wk, helping my dad 1-2hrs/week, fixing my sisters place 1-2hrs/wk, sleeping 8-10hrs/night, and doing about 1 hour a week of trivial to-do list type stuff. If I needed more money, I would start examining other habits or interests I have and perhaps try to write something, tutor some kids in Algebra, or make a porn website, or anything else that seems neat anyway that might make some money.
There are some things that I am irreversibly giving up though, and I just have to be ok with that. I won't ever be able to buy a house on my own in L.A.. Not really a problem since I see moving to Portland or Vancouver at some point, but still its a "loss". I also am eliminating at least 90% of the dating pool since traditional values are still running strong there. I won't be taking care of a housewife, or sending my kids to a private college, but I don't beleive in "taking care" of other people financially, and think the tuition spent on school is many fold more expensive than its value. I have learned way more from my own reading time than I did in the classroom.
The net result though is a simple and peaceful life. I don't have to worry anymore about what my best available balance transfer credit card offer is. I don't worry what others think about me b/c I don't rely on them for a job, social structure, or anything else. And anyway, most people I know think I'm a little crazy for most of my beliefs. But they also knew me 2-years ago when I was a married yuppy trying to take over the company I worked for.
Anyway, I probably left out a lot, but hopefully I drew the broad strokes. Life is incredibly short and I won't spend it doing what others think is best for me. It's difficult at times (especially around LA) not feeling like people value the same things as I do, but its a small price to pay for my freedom.
-Eric
____________
3rd Reply:
Says captZEEbo1: "vn post. Just out of curiosity, do you think you'll be this way the rest of your life, or do you see yourself going back to the corporate world again someday? "
That is a mighty difficult question. I suppose the simple and honest answer is: I don't know. My instincts tell me the shift is permanent. Certainly specific aspects will flex if or when I decide to have a family, or perhaps as rising health care costs require either more money or a decreased comfort level.
The principle that I would refer to as a general response would be: I will always do what I perceive to be in my best interests. Given my particular life experiences, parents, educations, and so on, I presently believe that happiness and peace are the best things for me to create in my life. I also believe that I have the ability (read: am learning the ability) to manifest in my life those circumstances and choices that offer me maximized peace and happiness, when I consciously make the effort.
The challenge for me, and I would imagine for most people, is to maintain that level of energy and focus that is required to manifest good situations in my life. In my particular case, given my particular likes and wants, I need to go out to parks, events, and parties regularly in order to keep meeting new people. This takes quite a bit of energy, and the return on my investment is often spaced out quite far (5-10+ outings to find truly meaningful friendships, variance is a bitch) so I have to maintain a level of faith that my continuous effort pays off. Similar to "the long-run" in poker, I stay focused on the goals of peace and happiness and then at any given moment try to make little choices that lead in that direction instead of away from it. It is often very easy to tell which decision leads towards my goals and which lead away, the difficulty lies in maintaining enough presence to care enough about getting what I want. Lazyness can be the largest impediment to this, often because my mind plays tricks on me, like "you don't need to brush your teeth tonight, you have been really good about it recently". Weird "logic" that sometimes does manage to persuade me. So my big goals of peace and happiness yield a meta-goal: Each time a small choice arises, leading either towards or away from the big goals, try to choose the option that I will be happy and peaceful towards In other words, using the teeth example, I try to choose the option that I can't argue with - I know that if I just go and brush my teeth I will be happier (more self-esteem, less dental bills, more will power, and so forth).
So tying this all back into the original question "do you think you'll be this way the rest of your life, or do you see yourself going back to the corporate world again someday?", I will only return if the sum of the choices I encounter each inarguably lead me there, and those choices are themselves imbued with peace and happiness. So my instincts say "no" because I can pretty clearly remember the types of ingrained beliefs I had to undo to finally leave that world. For example I would have to choose someday that I would prefer to get up early and go to bed accordingly (something I have never, even in school, been able to enjoy). I would have to choose to spend the majority of my time at an office, rather than with my friends/wife/kids/pets/etc. I would have to choose to allocate the planet's resources towards wealth creation instead of towards increasing biodiversity and health.
I made those types of choices easily when I was on autopilot from a finance education, but now that I understand the consequences of those choices... why would I choose to do something that brings me unhappiness and dis-ease?
As an aside, I appreciate all the feedback I have been getting on this stuff, it has been very useful for me to put down in words some of the stuff that is floating around in my head. It also has made me feel much more connected to the community around me to know that some other people are thinking about this too.
-Eric