The lifestyle of living in Playa is drastically different from what I had grown accustomed to in 27 years in the U.S. No one is really in a hurry here. And there’s a really palpable sense that you’re in a developing economy, not a developed one. There’s a certain eagerness and hunger in the air that is intoxicating. Everyone is down to their last few pesos, but no one is panicked because there’s an understanding that everything is going to work out. It’s raw. It’s revitalizing.

Going back to the U.S. is a bit of a culture shock now. I’ll always be an American to the core, but it definitely takes a few hours to re-calibrate my head after clearing U.S. customs. It’s like entering into a different universe. That’s what’s so awesome about traveling. Why do people fantasize about interstellar travel when we can visit alien civilizations on our own planet?

Here’s five things spending some time living outside of the U.S. has taught me:

1. Americans don’t know how good they have it. I never fully appreciated what it means to be from the U.S. until after I left. The American economy is one of the greatest marvels of human history. It’s easy to take it for granted when you’re born and raised there which is a shame because there are so many people who would (and do!) risk their lives for a chance to get to the U.S. and work. Being here makes me feel way more appreciative at the freedom to work in the U.S. It’s a privilege really. Think about this: there are people all over the world who would kill to be in your shoes working the job that you have, making the money that you make, and having access to the opportunities that you do.

2. Mexican culture is lovely. I feel nothing but sorry for Americans who harbor anti-Mexican sentiments. I have never once experienced anything other than complete courtesy and kindness from them. They are polite, considerate and family-oriented people. Yes, there a drug crime problem in Mexico, but let’s not blame people born into a set of laws that created a market for an underground drug trade. Be mad at the laws, not the people. There are drug crime issues all over the U.S. too. It’s unfortunate that the only thing Americans ever hear about Mexico is the violence reported on the evening news. That’s just 1% of the story. You don’t hear a word about the 99% of great things south of the border.

3. Most people don’t really give a crap if you’re American. It’s a stereotype on the international scene that Americans are pretty egotistical. Sadly, I have to say I’ve found this to be pretty true. When I came here, I was the worst of this stereotype. I thought the fact that I was an American would impress people. The reality is that most people don’t really give a crap if you’re from the U.S.

4. The world is getting a lot smaller. The Internet is really leveling out the global playing field. The next few years should be a pretty wild time for humanity. Check out this chart of global population and Internet users:

Technology is getting faster and cheaper. Owning a Mac is not as big of a deal as it used to be. Gradually, the whole world is getting online. I exist (these days, barely) in a whole sub-culture of people who make make playing poker online. All over the world people can do just about anything on the Internet ranging from learning about any subject under the sun, playing video poker at an online casino, or diagnosing their own medical problems. Chileans update their Facebook statuses, Aussies play casino games, Indians write crappy articles that pop up in Google search results. The whole world is growing closer together thanks to the power of the Internet. I get asked by Mexicans here if I’m on Facebook. I can remember getting on Facebook in 2004. It makes me feel like an Internet dinosaur.

5. The world is not that scary of a place. Living here has made me a little more relaxed about being in unknown areas. We hear about a lot of the bad things in the world and it creates a false reality in our minds of what the world is like. I think people are a lot more spooked than they need to be with regards to going to certain areas. I met a guy here who rode his bike all the way from Tennessee(!!!). I asked him if he ever felt like he was in danger during the trip. He said the most scared he felt on the whole ride was when he was going through Louisiana.

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Killing the Buddha by Sam Harris

Great article by Sam Harris (the “great” is nearly redundant there) about how Buddhism as a religion gets in the way of spreading its wisdom.

to turn the Buddha into a religious fetish is to miss the essence of what he taught.

The wisdom of the Buddha is currently trapped within the religion of Buddhism.

It does not seem much of an exaggeration to say that if you are reading this article, you are in a better position to influence the course of history than almost any person in history. Given the degree to which religion still inspires human conflict, and impedes genuine inquiry, I believe that merely being a self-described “Buddhist” is to be complicit in the world’s violence and ignorance to an unacceptable degree.

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The most mind-bending physics lecture I have ever seen. A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss.

I’d recommend watching this completely sober. It’s enough of a trip by itself. I won’t even try to summarize as that would suggest I understood the lecture well, except to say that I think Krauss, who has figured out more in his ~40 years on this earth than you or I would if we lived to be 100,000, succeeds in making the point that the universe is literally made out of nothing. This one I’ll need to watch again sometime.

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Awesome mash-up of anti-consumerist propoganda. Multiple Bill Hicks clips so you know it’s good.

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Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Beatles Songs. There’s an interesting, insightful article to go with each song. I was thoroughly entertained for a few hours listening to the track while reading the corresponding article. Learned a ton of interesting things about the group. For instance, did you know that Eric Clapton was thisclose to replacing George Harrison at one point during a feud between he and John Lennon? Maybe you did. Maybe you’re a better Beatles fan than I was before reading these Stones pages.

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It’s referred to as the 20 minutes that changed music: Queen’s performance at the Live Aid concert in 1985. It’s considered by many the greatest rock performance of all-time.

Step 1: Make popcorn.
Step 2: Dim lights.
Step 3: Press play, full screen.

• So Steve Jobs was kind of a prick. I find this somewhat unsurprising. You probably can’t draw the type of innovation out of people that led to Apple’s raging success without using them and abusing them to get there.
• As a younger man, he was pretty deep into the counter-culture hippie movement of the 70s. He even traveled to India for a time to study Buddhism and incorporated a lot of his affinity for a simplistic, zen lifestyle into Apple’s products. The film only briefly hints at it once, but Jobs credited acid for a lot of his success saying, “Doing LSD was one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.”
• The film really portrays Bill Gates as a slack-jawed square who idolized Jobs which is pretty funny.
• I love the hysterical girl who is filled with joy after waiting on line for 8 hours to buy an iPad. Like dear god, just buy it a month later with no wait. It’s not like whatever you’re going to do with it in that month (just send out lots of emails to make people jealous of the ‘Sent from my iPad’ sig-line, probably) should be valued higher than having those 8 hours to do something more interesting than idly waiting. That’s why Apple is so fascinating (and also why I also think their stock is way overvalued): it drives people to a completely irrational furor over some pricey device they don’t need that will be a relic in 18 months. See: boy in China selling a kidney to buy an iPhone and iPad.
• I have to give credit to my poker friend in Playa, ‘Kevlar’, for pointing this out to me originally, but it’s fascinating how much public outcry there was over his death. Kevlar said it best (paraphrasing), “it seems like everyone was sad and talking about what an amazing person and innovator he was, but I don’t really remember anyone caring that much about him when he was alive.” I have to agree. The people crying and holding up video of a candlelight on their iPad at vigils seems a little silly. Maybe I’m just not hip enough to get why Apple is so amazing.

Interesting film, I’m glad I watched it.

If you grew up rooting for the Bulls in the 90s, you undoubtedly remember Rodman as the brash-tempered party animal with an absurd tenacity for rebounding. Despite being just 6′6″ tall, a relatively average height for an NBA player, Rodman was the best rebounder the league has ever seen.

Skeptical Sports dedicated a comprehensive, four-part series to using data to show just how good Rodman was. The purpose behind the series was to show why Rodman should undoubtedly be voted into the NBA Hall of Fame one year after he failed to be inducted in his first year of eligibility. They used stats that make those listed on the back of basketball cards seem like a fuzzy old black-and-white TV compared to a modern 3-D 59″ plasma.

So just how good was he? By looking at the performance of teams he was on when he was out of the lineup as compared to when he played in the game, they are able to acquire a stat known as win differential percentage. Basically, this stat expresses how valuable a player is to his team by showing how many more games that team wins with him in the lineup. Rodman’s win differential percentage was 18.1%, highest of a group of 470 players whose style is compared with Rodman’s as well as HOFers and future HOFers. Put another way, the teams he was on could expect to win 18.1% more of their games with him in the lineup than without him. That’s one player single-handedly accounting for nearly 15 wins in an 82-game schedule!

As Skeptical Sports points out, Rodman’s absurdly high win differential percentage is even more startling when you consider the high caliber of teams he played on. In other words, not only was it harder for him to contribute on these uber-talented teams, but he also had a ceiling to how much of an impact he could have on their win percentage since they won so many games without him anyway.

The man was a total statistical anomaly. The numbers he put up in his career are so rare that you could expect a player of his caliber to come along once every 400 years.

The Rodman data on Skeptical Sports is too immense to fully absorb in any reasonable amount of time provided you’re not a savant, but give it a look anyway because it’s really fascinating stuff. Dennis Rodman’s career was the little dot on the line graph that seems so out of place you’re left to conclude it must be an error of data entry. But it wasn’t. The guy was really that good!

First, as one of my favorite dudes in poker, Mike McDonald, pointed out after his first WSOP last year, it doesn’t really make sense to play the WSOP unless you’re a high net worth individual who can invest in all of their own action. “More peoples financial situations are hurt than improved as a result of the WSOP.” This speaks directly to someone like me who has to foot a lot of additional expenses to travel to Vegas for the WSOP in hopes that I clear enough money there to justify having made the trip. If I lose, I’m out a bunch of money I never really had to begin with just to get out there and take a shot. If I win, as I did last year coming in 133rd in the Main Event, I’m really not that much of a winner after factoring in investor distributions and expenses.

Still, the chance to win more than a million dollars without having to put up much risk is quite appealing. I’ve worked rangood my way up the poker ladder enough that I can probably pretty easily put together $10,000 of other people’s money to sit in the Main Event for a 20% or so freeroll. And I will probably do just that again this year. Making a deep run in the Main Event is about as much fun as you can have in any setting where there’s a dress code. But as far as spending several weeks in Vegas playing a ton of the prelim events and wasting away among other grinders… I’m just not sure the idea of it entices me as much as it used to.

For me, there are added benefits of limiting the time I spend at the WSOP beyond just the savings in cost-of-living. A big one is that I hate casinos. I mean, I can tolerate them in little doses and stuff, but as a blanket statement, I hate them. They’re drab and depressing and full of hopeless suckers gambling away money they can’t afford to lose. The air is smoky. They’re full of loud, obnoxious people and noises. There’s little to no natural light getting in. They’re basically hell on earth. Spending the entire summer dwelling in and around that element really takes a toll on your mental health in my experience. If I want to light money on fire, there are plenty of internet casinos with slot machines that don’t require one to sit in a smoky, depressing room.

I think by abstaining from this element for most of the summer, one is left feeling a lot more refreshed for the Main Event. Each year I made a deep run came after taking a week or two away from the city to decompress. Maybe some people can keep their mental clarity firing on all cylinders for weeks at a time in Vegas. That hasn’t historically been my experience and I’ve definitely benefited from “getting out of dodge” to clear my head before the Main Event. It’s by far the most important poker tournament of the year, so it makes sense to plan to be at your most optimal levels of functionality to have a chance at sustaining the days-long haul.

Looking at the 2012 WSOP schedule, my hope this year is to get into Vegas on or around Wednesday, July 4th for the $1,000 no-limit event and then play the Main Event a few days later. Despite my griping, it really is an awesome experience to play in the WSOP. I’m looking forward to having the chance to do it once more this year. But I think I’m taking a pass on grinding through weeks of prelims.

The story on this Friday night was deciding to grind an evening poker session. I generally play Sundays plus perhaps one other day of the week. But I’ve been feeling really good about my recent sessions, so decided to chase some losses from Wednesday. I began registering for tournaments around 5:00 pm and caught the end of the late registration for a $2 PLO rebuy 6-max tournament that, while may sound like small beans, and for the most part it is, has been a staple of my poker schedule lately after uncovering how supremely soft the low buy-in PLO tournaments are.

Tonight I made a deep run in one such tournament, an $8 PLO rebuy 6-max, before I began having connection issues with PokerStars. It was strange because I was connected just fine on a web browser, AIM, torrent downloading program (just kidding RIAA!) and a few other programs, but not on PokerStars. After the problem persisted for several minutes, I made the decision to jolt out the front door and into a taxi to take a ride across town to a condo shared by four Playa poker refugees.

After an agonizing ten-minute crawl through Playa del Carmen street traffic during which I kept envisioning blinds being posted and auto-folded, I resecured a safe connection at my friends’ poker palace. Feeling disappointment, not to mention frustration, at the smaller chip stacks I had returned to, I refocused myself and soon was 1st out of 10 remaining players in the $8 PLO rebuy. Then, some dreadful stuff soured the moment. As can happen in PLO. AAxx was cracked for a big all-in preflop hand, I ran a set into a larger one, and then flopped top two pair and a flush draw and got it in against top set (I filled up on the turn and had one out). Poof. 9th place for $142, a far cry from the $1,200 top prize I felt optimistic about claiming just moments before.

I toiled along for a few more hours watching listening to my fellow comrades grown and sigh at their own dashed expectations before running pocket 8s into A6 to bust out around 90th in a no-limit tournament that was paying $6.5k to first. After getting my ass beat in a game of NHL 2k12 on xBox, it was back to the street to hail a taxi home. Normally I’d walk, but tonight I was unthrilled about the prospects of a long walk through a sea of tourists in a better disposition than myself. I took the lazy way out for 25 pesos.

Getting to spend time around other poker grinders down here can be nice in doses. I’m told there are around 35 of us lurking in Playa. Each of the eight to ten guys I’ve met seem to be cool dudes who are pretty happy about being down here. I’m with them on that. There’s an unspoken understanding between all of us that our lives right now are pretty cool. It’s like… we’re in Mexico!

Being here is strange and wonderful. It at times feels like Never Never Land. I’ve lost 40 pounds, am in the best shape of my life, and am generally enjoying a bit higher of a baseline happiness level since arriving. A tropical climate and a low cost of living can have that effect I suppose.

I’m not sure how long I’ll be here. I’ve been saying that since I arrived. It could be just a couple more months, or a couple years. If at some point my time here starts to feel like a dead-end or a more appealing opportunity presents itself, I would probably feel motivated to embrace another move and lifestyle change. And while either of those possibilities could conceivably present themselves soon, they haven’t yet yet. So I’ll continue enjoying the dream-like experience of living here and hope that maybe eventually my poker results will join the ranks of the positive things to speak of from my time in Mexico.

Part one focused on Socrates and his wisdom on self-confidence. Part two highlighted what Epicurus had to say about happiness.

This post will be a summary of the film’s third installment, Seneca’s thoughts on anger.

Anger is a problem that nearly everyone deals with. Before I saw this segment of Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness, I had never considered the rather simple solution to anger that Seneca offers. Well, it’s at least simple to comprehend. I’ve found it’s quite another thing to actually internalize it and live your life by the wisdom he offers.

Seneca was a Roman philosopher who was alive at around the same time as Christ. He pinpointed anger as a major problem in the Roman empire and decided to make it his mission to help calm people down. He had good reason to be concerned about anger. Seneca lived in the days of murderous, short-tempered dictators. We might think anger is a problem in society today, but in Seneca’s time a small slip-up could anger the wrong person enough to lead to you to being thrown to the lions. He called anger, “the most hideous and frenzied of all emotions.”

Seneca did not view anger as an uncontrollable human emotion. He viewed it as a philosophical problem that could be treated. His central tenant was that anger arises due to irrational ideas held about the world. Seneca thought that the main fault of people prone to anger is that they are far too optimistic. This makes a lot of sense, I think. When we expect or hope too much, we become angry upon the inevitability that reality will collide with our unrealistic expectations.

Most of us are prone to getting upset about things like traffic jams or our Internet service going out. In Seneca’s estimation, these things are neither unfair nor surprising. They are merely a feature of being alive. Anyone who gets angry about these things simply has the wrong expectations of how the world operates. Seneca’s primary piece of advice on curbing anger is to be more pessimistic. He felt that if people are more pessimistic about daily life that they will be less surprised by disappointments and thus less angered by them.

Seneca suggested that we are not really as free as we think we are. Rather, we are more like dogs leashed to the back of a moving chariot. Our leashes are long enough to give us some freedom and maneuverability, but not long enough to allow us to move wherever we want. We are still on a leashed and anchored to the chariot of life. With this being the case, Seneca pointed out that it is sometimes far better to follow along in a direction that you don’t want to go rather than to kick against something that you cannot change.

Being able to identify what we can and cannot change is a really important ability that can be a key to our freedom and happiness. We have an ability to change our attitude towards things that we cannot change. I’ve read advice before that suggests complaining is always irrational. If you’re complaining it’s either about a.) something you can control in which case you should make the changes necessary to satisfy your disappointment or b.) just banging your head against the wall over something you can’t change. In either case, there is never a particularly fruitful purpose to complaining.

One observation Seneca made in his life is that prosperous people are more prone to anger. I have made a similar observation since living in Playa del Carmen. The only angry or unhappy people I ever encounter here are usually Americans (myself included). I’m not sure I can offer a single example of a time I saw a Mexican act upset or angry. Even when Mexico blew a 2-0 lead with an 11-10 player advantage in a soccer match vs. Brazil, or when Manny Pacquiao could should have lost in a judge’s decision in a boxing match against Mexican fighter Juan Manuel Marquez, the Mexican people watching those events in the same bar as me seemed hardly fazed. In America, you’d have guys rioting in the streets or beating their wives over those outcomes. Here, there was a mere shrug of the shoulders as if it was really no big deal and they went home. I was way more upset in both instances and in the case of the boxing match, I even had money on Pacquiao!

So it’s easy for me to believe Seneca’s presupposition that wealthier people tend to have more expectations. Rich people tend to believe that their money will insulate them from disappointments which is simply untrue. Poorer people have a certain advantage in avoiding anger due to a tendency to expect less out of the world. I think that generally speaking Americans have a harder time with anger issues than people in poorer countries since basically we’re incredibly spoiled and have come to expect things to always go our way.

A practical approach that Seneca gave to avoiding anger was to prepare yourself mentally for disappointment. He believed advice like, “don’t worry, it will be fine,” was actually cruel because it leaves people unprepared if things turn out not to be okay. He recommended an opposite strategy: a daily meditation on all of the things that might go wrong. It might seem like preposterous advice, but imagine how much more enjoyable life might be for all of us if we left our house in the morning not really expecting too much. It leaves us in a position to be pleasantly surprised and grateful when things actually do go smoothly for us. Seneca is not saying to never expect things to go well for us, but rather just to be psychologically prepared for a day when they don’t.

Seneca did not just talk the talk. He met death after being implicated (perhaps wrongly so) in a conspiracy against the Roman emperor. Seneca accepted that there was nothing he could do to wiggle out of his death sentence and calmly slit his veins as he had been ordered to do.

You might say the guy was a bit of a defeatist. But his understanding of the key to remaining calm and avoiding anger is inspiring some 2,000 years after his death.

“What need is there to weap over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.” – Seneca

prescription speed works until it stops working, and if it hasn’t stopped working for you yet, believe me, it will. It deprives your body of natural cues (hunger, sleepiness), wears away at your edges until finally you’re all raw nerve, with no inner resources of physical or psychological strength left to deal with your life.

Adderall use is pretty common among poker player types like myself. I sought out the drug in 2006 when I believed myself to be struggling with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). I have my doubts about whether or not it’s a real “disease” (like, say, cancer) or rather something more along the lines of a natural psychological resistance to assimilating to an insane world. Feeling pressures as a young adult to be more creative and productive, a blog by former poker pro and software engineer Paul Phillips in which he stated that he feels as though his life is better with Adderall than without it was the final influence I needed to convince myself to seek out a prescription.

I was nervous heading to my psychiatrist’s office. Aside from a brief stint of seeing a therapist in high school, it was my first foray into the world of seeking professional psychiatric aid. I had convinced myself that Adderall was the solution of getting unstuck from the rut I was in. I was worried my psychiatrist might not agree. This was before I learned that modern psychiatrists are basically just drug dealers. I was out of his office in 15 minutes with a prescription.

For about three years, I ingested an average of about 25 mgs of Adderall per day on probably 95% of days. I was on Adderall all throughout my deep run in the 2008 WSOP Main Event in which I finished 151st and appeared on ESPN. Many poker players are drawn to the appeal of Adderall for the heightened focus it can provide one to make it through a grueling grind. It’s hard for me to quantify exactly how much of an edge Adderall gave me in poker, if one at all. This year, when I finished 133rd in the Main Event, I did so without the aid of a chemical alterant.

I theorize that all drugs offer a roughly equivalent measure of downsides as they do upsides. That for all of the benefits they offer, there will be an equal tax to pay later. Anyone who has ever experienced a night out of drinking can relate to this.

For me, Adderall certainly had its upsides. It can ignite you with a superhuman feeling of focus and energy. If your mind feels mushy and you’re having a hard time focusing on pushing the ol’ proverbial ball up the hill, taking Adderall is like strapping on a jet pack. I could maintain the cognitive function to work well into the night. It flips a switch in your mind where regular human sleep-wake and alertness cycles no longer apply. You feel just as alert and focused at midnight as you did at noon. Many Adderall users report needing something in the evenings to take the edge off so they could sleep. For me, alcohol often did the trick.

Like someone stuck in an abusive relationship, I used Adderall far longer than I ever should have. It’s easy to accept taking a pill as being just part of your daily routine. It gets to a point where you don’t even question if it’s actually a net positive for your life. I can’t sit here and say with total certainty that Adderall was a net negative for my life. Who knows where I would be without it. But what I can say is that the drug has a lot of downsides that should give anyone considerable pause before they start using it.

Ms. Marnell hit the nail right on the head. Adderall wears away at your normal human mental cues. Eventually, it’s powerful effects stop working for you. You can’t even remember what you were like without it. And when that time comes, you find yourself right back where you started only with one more problem: trying to figure out how to live without it.

Unfortunately, we live in a world that stresses productivity and infinite growth. In such a paradigm, a drug like Adderall is always going to be alluring. It makes me feel awful to think about how many of our youth are being fed this drug like candy because authority figures like doctors and teachers have decided they need it.

Adderall robs users of their natural vitality for life and turns them into an uber-focused drone. It’s shameful to me that our medical system has become all about the quick fix for psychiatric issues. Rather than equip you with the real skills you need to deal with the problems in your life, you’re handed a prescription for a drug that just buries them under what ultimately become even bigger problems.

Psychopharmaceuticals have their place in our world. For some people, they are a necessary aid at rebuilding mental stability. But unfortunately they have spawned a massive industry with considerable influence over government and doctors which feeds on offering a solution in a pill to people whose problems need to be addressed in more meaningful ways.

I never needed Adderall. You probably don’t either. A lot of our problems can be addressed by being smarter about the foods and substances we put into our bodies, daily exercise and meditation, and reclaiming our minds from trash that leads to thoughts of inadequacy.

Epicurus spent his life chasing happiness and was led to conclude that it’s a rather tricky issue. He thought that pleasure was the most important thing in life and that one has no reason to feel guilty for chasing pleasure. He was, however, known for getting by on very little often making meals out of water, bread, and a few olives.

His central philosophy was that humans are not very good at understanding what makes us happy and that we can easily and mistakenly conclude that material things are what will make us happy. It’s the “what we want is not what we need” philosophy: we pursue our manic impulses not really understanding what it is that makes us happy.

Epicurus believed he discovered the formula for what we really do need in order to be happy. He believed happiness requires three things:

1. Friends

When Epicurus moved to Athens, he bought a large house in the middle of town and asked a group of friends to move in with him. He did this because he viewed friendship as being something we should seek to have around at all times, not just for the occasional phone call or whatever. He suggested making an effort to never eat alone. “A feeding without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf,” he said. He determined it more important who you eat with than what you eat.

2. Freedom

Later in life, Epicurus and his friends left Athens and started a commune in a remote part of Greece. “We must free ourselves from the prison of everyday life and politics,” he said. He thought it was better to have a simple life in which one is free than a life in which we are answerable to insufferable bosses, etc. He and his friends at the commune became self-sufficient and gained independence from what other people thought. They no longer felt that they had something to prove to others financially.

3. An Analyzed Life

Epicurus thought it was important to slow down and analyze our worries and troubles. He thought that the key to eliminating our anxieties was to give ourselves time to think them through. In order to do this, we need time and space to allow for quiet contemplation about our lives.

His philosophy was that if one does not have much money but does have these three things, then they will not be denied happiness. Conversely, someone with money who is lacking friends, freedom, and space for an analyzed life will never be happy. You hear this backed up in psychological studies that show money does not significantly contribute to one’s happiness once their basic needs are met.

Epicurus was a strong critic of advertising. He blamed it for clouding our view of the path to happiness. He suggested that the reason advertising works is because it succeeds in convincing us on a subconscious level that the product being sold will provide us with one or more of the three things that we need to be happy.

So an ad like the one above might succeed in selling us Bacardi when it’s really friends and freedom that we’re looking for.

Interestingly, all of the books that Epicurus wrote were eventually lost. His wisdom survived by being passed down as a creed through societies that formed based on his suggestions for living. A wealthy man, Diogenes of Oenoanda, paid to have a summary of Epicurean philosophy carved on the walls of an ancient city in what is now in modern southwest Turkey. Diogenes believed that we needed constant reminders of what makes us happy and that simply studying philosophy once in a while wasn’t enough. Think of it as balancing out the forces of advertising which seek to cloud our true desires. Diogenes’ wall was an advertisement for what we really do need.

The film shows a modern day effort to replicate that type of counter advertising. Unfortunately, as they point out, philosophers aren’t known for having the kind of budget to make major advertising purchases. But one sign they put up in a mall was pretty clever. It depicted a large mansion with a luxury car parked out front. The photo contains an asterisk at the top with a small warning in the corner that says, “Happiness Not Included”. I wonder what effect advertising of this nature might have on a grander scale? If people can be convinced that they need material things, can they be successfully reminded that they in fact do not need them through the same medium?

A few months ago, I finally got around to having a VHS tape with a bunch of footage of jumps I did converted to DVD. Last night, I spent a few hours editing the footage into a YouTube-ready presentation. It worked out perfectly because when I selected all of the footage I wanted to include it amounted to exactly 10 minutes on the dot, the maximum length for a YouTube video.

It’s worth keeping in mind that while 151 jumps might seem like a lot, it’s basically nothing in the world of skydiving. So this is all pretty much n00b donk amateur footage and nothing nearly as cool as stuff like this being performed by guys who have made literally thousands of skydives over the course of several years. I included some commentary below the video. Most of the footage was shot in the air over Goshen, Indiana unless otherwise specified.

0:00 – Exiting a balloon at Rantoul, Illinois from my perspective. It’s a surreal experience since normally you’re exiting to a ton of noise. Leaving a balloon is all quiet until you pick up velocity.

0:19 – A tricky thing about jumping from a balloon is that you’re exiting wherever the wind happens to have blown you rather than safely over the airport. It creates an added challenge and element of danger. Here I’m setting up for a landing in an elementary school playground and it wasn’t the smoothest landing.

0:56 – My 100th jump. Out of a big Russian helicopter in the air over Rantoul, Illinois. Had to oblige the group in front of me’s request to snap a photo of them before they exited. My friend Scott is on video and gets a nice shot of the helicopter when he deploys.

1:40 – What they call a “hop-n-pop” where you exit at low altitude and deploy rather soon after. I did some backflips on the exit.

2:08 – If you look carefully you can see I had line twists on that deployment. That technically falls into the category of a skydiving malfunction but it is generally very benign and happens every so often. You just have to twist your way out of it.

2:50 – A three-way exit that I cut off pretty quickly since the guy on video was pretty heavy and sunk like a stone rendering him unable to keep us in the frame for the rest of the jump.

3:19 – I don’t know what this was. I guess a buddy and I decided to have a little fun on the ride up and make a video pretending it was my first jump. Clearly, I’m not a very good actor. I exited in the classic n00b fetal position, a big no-no for proper skydiving form.

3:55 – This was what is known as a “tracking jump”. When you put your arms down to your side rather than holding them out in front of you, the change in weight distribution propels you horizontally across the sky. It’s as close to flying as a human can get without wearing a wingsuit.

4:27 – Two-way exit again cut off because of heavy cameraman. Seated in the pink shirt is my friend’s girlfriend who rode up to altitude with us to watch us exit. That experience alone is pretty hairy since most people have never ridden in a plane so small let alone be seated 3 inches away from an open door at 10,000 feet.

5:03 – This was a pretty good jump with me on camera filming the heavy dude. He hesitated on exit but managed to fall fast enough to catch up with me for a dock before we had to break off and deploy.

6:30: – This is me on video filming a tandem jump. What you see at the beginning of the jump was the closest I came to any type of serious catastrophe in skydiving.

7:25 – Tandems deploy very high for safety reasons so the videographer can usually take a long enough delay to keep their deployment in the frame before having to deploy himself. I was pretty proud of the effort for it being the first (and only) time I videoed a tandem; staying with them and keeping everything in frame like that is pretty challenging when you have as little experience as I did. The girl doing the tandem opted not to pay to have it videoed so I was videoing it sans-pressure to just practice. After the dropzone owner saw the footage he was mad at me for giving it to her for free since he said it was high-quality enough that they could have charged her for it.

7:30 – So this is a slo-mo replay of the exit on the tandem jump. What you’ll notice happens is that the tandem’s “drogue”, which is designed to slow down the heavy package to a more sane rate of freefall, hits me on deployment. It was an “oh shit” moment at the time that ended up being no big deal. I just made a bad exit since I wasn’t experienced or prepared enough to know how to properly exit a Cessna with a tandem and ended up in a really bad location for the drogue deployment: right above them. Fortunately, I didn’t get tangled in the line or panic and collide with them (which can happen when you’re right above someone due to the dead air their freefall creates above them). Having a guy with only 100-some jumps video a tandem was a pretty “wild west” move that a bigger dropzone would never in a million years allow. But we had fun in Goshen since it was a pretty small crew and sometimes little liberties got taken here or there.

8:26 – Two-way jump with my friend Keri. Poor girl was always getting hit on by everyone since she was decently cute and more or less the only female around. Interesting side note is that she was raised Amish but decided jumping out of planes was a little more fun than practicing the Amish lifestyle.

9:30 – Keri hits a perfect landing on the gravel pit. I opt for my own shadow instead.