Medley 251: Co-Living, Tribes, The Great Outdoors, Farmland, Future Art, Money Pile, Sunlight...
This is the Monday Medley, a newsletter that goes out, you guessed it, every Monday. I republish it here for sharing and referencing, but if you'd like to sign up you can do so right here:
Happy Monday!
I published two new articles last week. First, one on the "Money Pile" thought exercise I do each month that motivated me to sell some Bitcoin at the recent peak.
And I published a longer version of the essay in last week's Medley: Tie Your Camels.
On to the Medley!
The World of Helping Texas
🖼 One quick note before this weeks essay, my friend is selling a limited run of 100 prints of this beautiful map of Texas's indigenous tribes. Proceeds are going to help low socio-economic native American elders affected by last week's snow/ice storms here in Texas. It's a beautiful piece and going to a good cause, so check it out!
The World of Getting Outside
🐦 I tweeted this the other week:
🏠 I can't help but feel like we have been massively underestimating the negative health consequences of spending most of our days indoors.
☀️ COVID has really shown how important Vitamin D is. I've shared stats on that a few times like in Medley 239. But there are plenty of other interesting consequences of too much time inside. For example, it's apparently a major factor in whether or not you end up needing glasses, something I mentioned in Medley 249 and you can read more about here: Sources 1, 2, 3, 4
🌳 My question is... how many other small health issues are caused by lack of sun exposure? Since I started tracking it, I've noticed that the amount of time I spend outside in a day is one of the strongest correlates with how good I feel about the day. It's stronger than whether or not I drank alcohol, how much I had to work, and whether or not I worked out. The highest leverage thing I can do to feel "good" at the end of the day is spend as much of it outside as possible.
🙍♂️ This makes a lot of sense when we think about it. When in our evolutionary history would you have spent most of the day out of the fresh air and sunlight? Would you ever have? So it makes sense that when we're removed from those stimuli, we feel sluggish, anxious, depressed, fatigued, whatever. Our body is probably wondering what the hell is going on.
🖥🌤 The biggest challenge is setting up a good outdoor workstation. Not necessarily one of those tiny homes you can plop out in your massive backyard if you're fortunate enough to have one, something simpler. If you know someone working on a good outdoor desk setup, send them my way.
⌚️ But in the meantime, a challenge I have for you is to try to start tracking how many hours a day you spend outside in the fresh air and sunlight. Can you do 2 per day? 4? It's surprisingly challenging.
🌡 One adaptation it definitely requires is getting used to being slightly uncomfortable with temperatures again. Most of us are probably way too soft with what we expect the temperature around us to be. Pushing yourself to your comfort limit once in a while by getting really cold is probably a good thing.
The World of Future Art
🍄 This is an incredibly cool piece of psychedelic art that moves around as the light on it changes. Definitely the closest thing I've seen to what the natural world looks like when you're on mushrooms.
✍🏼 I'm really excited for what we'll be able to do with psychedelics and VR in the future. Both for fun, and for therapeutic benefit. I have an article about a psychedelic experience I'm sitting on and can hopefully share in a couple months.
The World of Co-Housing
🏘 When I talk about Creator Towns the question of "co-housing" or "co-living" often comes up.
🙅♂️ I personally am pretty against the whole idea of co-housing. I just don't think it works, as we can see from pretty much every attempt to do it.
👍🏼 What does seem to work are apartments, and college dorms. Though I think most people have mixed feelings about their college dorm life.
🤔 My thoughts on it are similar to my thoughts on the polyamory movement and idea of "compersion". If we have a built in aversion to something, like our partner hooking up with other people, that isn't necessarily some bad societal idea we need to try to rationalize ourselves out of. It's probably something we should listen to.
🔐 Same thing for co-housing. We have certain needs for privacy, property, control, that tend to break down in communal living, and much like with Communism I don't think that's a sign that we need to "just do it right." Rather it's a sign it doesn't work.
📖 Okay all that said, this was an interesting read on co-buying property with friends.
The World of Corrections
💲 Last week I pointed out how Bill Gates has become the largest individual land owner in the country, and why that concerns me. But as Medley reader Duff pointed out, that's kind of a misleading statistic:
"There are 945,080,000 acres of farmland in the US. Gates' owns 242,000 acres. So he owns approximately 0.0026% of US farmland. A much bigger issue is big corporate conglomerates owning large amounts of US farmland, and there being very few of these thus discouraging marketplace competition."
🙌🏼 Thanks Duff!
End Note
As always, if you're enjoying the Medley, I'd love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up. I try to make it one of the best emails you get each week, and I hope you're enjoying it.
And should you come across anything interesting this week, send it my way! I love finding new things to read through members of this newsletter.
Have a great week,
Nat