I wanted to write an appreciation post for some of the stuff I like best on the internet. I thought I’d get this all in one, but I have a lot to write about. These series will be on authors and essayists and critics I admire and have watched or read on the internet over the years.
At this point, I am not 100% sure on how I found this blog. I think I started reading David’s writing in 2010 or 2011 because I landed on the page through an old Firefox add-on called StumbleUpon (here is the page circa that year), a roulette of curated webpages that was acquired and reacquired to death through the 2010’s
In 2011 I was 20 and didn’t have anyone around my age exploring their ‘self.’ I knew of self-help books, but as I knew it those were primarily written with a reader as the intended audience to receive advice. Raptitude was different in that it was an open book into David’s self-insight and self-improvement. What he thought of himself and society, his feelings, and what was important to him. He wrote with an audience in mind, but not an explicit to-do list of what a reader would need to be happy. His topics were what he did, thought and what he found to work for himself.
The post that hooked me into Raptitude was an epiphanies post from October 2010 about 9 of David’s insights in life. At 20, I had never given thought to how much of my experience was subjective and in my head. I had never truly examined my thinking, my feelings, how much of life is just made up. I had been told and could feel what was important and I just floated along that path. Still, some of this insight was out of reach, I was still impulsive through my early 20s. This didn’t become something I could regularly practice for a while longer, but it did stick in the back of my head and was my first exposure into mindfulness.
One thing I admire are David’s experiments, his concerted effort into a lifestyle change, driven only by the desire to see if it works for him. In my experiences, the primary lifestyle driver comes from necessity. I don’t think enough people, myself included, take a look at an aspect of their life they wish to change and just act without external cause. Many less write a report on it for others to see. Some of my favorite of his experiments include:
- His very first one, the 30 day meditation experiment (a failure, but with valuable insight).
- The Soylent experiment, which I also tried for a month, but was completely unsatisfied to drink a meal.
- The 8hr workday for himself, in which David questions why he can work for others for 8hrs a day, and why he can not do the same for himself.
I am gushing about this blog a little bit and I think I could keep going for a while. David is a great and insightful writer. Sometimes his posts just cut right down to a truth about life. His ‘Essential Raptitude’ on the right hand side of the page is a great place to start.
My favorite is the first of the Essential: Wise people have rules for themselves. This post is about how having rigid rules for ourselves doesn’t limit freedom, it is empowering and keeps us honest. There are decisions we make for ourselves a long time in advance that we should not leave open to self-negotiation. This is the very foundation of discipline, which has unashamedly taken me a very long time to learn.
I used to find it very easy to negotiate with myself to go out for a few drinks the night before a busy day of work or to skip class because the weather was too bad or even too nice for that matter. Short-term Zach could always win out over long-term Zach. It’s still a work in progress but I am getting better.
I also like: The person you used to be still tells you what to do. In this post, David recounts a story of how he and a romantic interest discussed going out and dancing to electronic dance music, much to David’s dismay. When David was barely an adult he decided he didn’t like EDM, and had let this opinion drive his entire 20s. He ended up going out dancing and had a blast. This experience caused him to begin to reexamine everything about his personality that he had chosen for himself when he was a decade younger.
I think I am a good: “I’ll try anything once” type of person, but who I am now at 29 is a vastly different person from when I was 19. So now I can try anything ‘once,’ again, as a new me.
Another oldie that I remember from way back that made David’s Essential list is: How to walk across a parking lot. This post is a breakdown on mindfulness and how we rush through almost every activity like a task. How taking it slow and giving mundane activities meaning can be enlightening.
It is funny, a stereotypical image of vacation is a person on a beach under an umbrella with a drink. “Now I can relax” this person says. I don’t think people relax as much as they dream on vacation, especially if they are a hectic and stressed person otherwise. Take solace in enjoying the small things. A walk in the park, driving without worry of being late, making a cup of tea, looking over a selection in a bakery, writing a blog post =). A large part of life is relaxing and enjoyable if you just let it be. How to walk across a parking lot was the first piece of writing I had read that made me think about that.
As an aside: while writing this, I am walking back through the older posts on Raptitude looking for the ones I best remember. David is about 10 years older than me, and reading his posts from a decade ago frames his experience better now than they ever did when I was 20. Its more peer-like than mentor, and it’s obvious how much older and wiser and mentor-like he seems on posts he is writing now at 40.
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