July 2020

Welcome back to The Obvious Channel, where I have many obvious things to say. And the obvious thing that comes to mind today is it feels good to feel good. We love having a good mood. Those days when everything is just lined up right, and feels like life is good. It’s all these different […]

It seems like another driver of anxiety is this feeling that “I want to be certain. I want to be clear.” And it’s so understandable, of course. It’s wonderful when we clearly know something. It’s just very well defined, absolutely this is the situation, these are the steps, this is what’s coming. I mean, if

I really like thinking of ways to do good things with bad intentions, to use what might be considered bad intentions and to channel them into doing good things. And so of course, one of the best ones is laziness. We naturally see laziness generally as a bad thing. We want to do things, and

When it comes to the idea of zooming out our focus – not into becoming cluttered, mixed focus, but just expanding what we’re paying attention to – we can imagine the continuum of possibilities for our focus. So the narrowest would be focusing on a very specific task, and we’re completely zoomed in and focused

It seems like whatever I say, whatever I think about, come up with some kind of principle for life, here’s a way to do things: there’s always some kind of an opposite way. There’s always some kind of other way of looking at things. And it’s the same with this idea of focus. I’ve talked

So that empty feeling. I’ve talked about how it can be caused by missing emotional content, emotional fuel. When we’re living inside some kind of a concept, some kind of an abstract, cerebral cloud of ideas that doesn’t have that emotional power to drive us, it starts to feel kind of empty. It’s like we’re

So as part of this whole balance between being serious and being funny, taking life as something to take in earnest or something to see as a joke: well, a big part of it seems like it’s the way we view ourselves. So this idea of not taking yourself too seriously, taking yourself lightly, seems

Last time, I took a look at the case to be made for how life is a joke. And the taking of everything very seriously, and putting all our earnest effort into making money and finding happiness and all these kind of concerns: there’s something kind of silly about it. And so there is a

How serious is life? Is life a joke? Is life no joke? Somewhere in between? This is a question that I am still looking into, looking for the answer to. I don’t know where to place life on this scale. So what I would then do is just look at the scale itself. What is

It seems like so much of my life, so much of the time that goes by, there’s kind of this mental cloud that’s sort of hanging over my mind. It’s all these kind of structures and thoughts that are swirling around, so many different things going on. And even as I’m doing one thing, maybe