Past Correspondence
This page contains all past “future correspondence” newsletter updates from TinyLetter. It’s one long page, so you can scroll through them in chronological order, or use these links to jump to individual updates. Yes, I’m aware that some links are broken and it may look weird on mobile.
Quick Links
01 – January 11, 2019
Hey Friends,
Happy New Year! I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays. Like many people, my energy levels follow some type of awkward sine curve. I oscillate between periods of action and periods of reflection. While the turn of a calendar year is, of course, arbitrary at the base level, I find this time of year to be perfect for reflection.
I always forget how much I did in a given year until I go through my calendar and photos and list it all out. I’m sharing the output to give context on who I seem to be right now. Being in nature and being in motion are huge priorities for me, so it should be no surprise that I spent more than half of my weekends outside of San Francisco and mostly outdoors.
Alright, here is my (abridged) 2018 Year in Review:
Work
- Instacart offered to hire me as their first ever “Solutions Architect”. They didn’t know exactly what this was meant to be, and I was probably the only one nuts enough to consider it, so now I work in the grocery business.
Play
Brought in 2018 in a friend’s Point Reyes cabin where I learned to fly a Mavic Pro drone and managed to shoot one decent photo.
Snowboarded a fair bit in Tahoe and made an icy trip to Park City, UT.
Took a semester of Ceramics at CCSF Fort Mason (for free – thanks San Francisco!)
Went cross-country skiing for the first time. Didn’t die!
Made a visit to DC to surprise a friend on his birthday.
Caught a California wildflower bloom.
Climbed some things including Half-Dome and Mount Shasta (!).
Visited Austin for a week
Bought a mountain bike and actually use it. Haven’t died.
Danced a bunch at Priceless, a small music festival in Belden, CA
Camped in a forest fire lookout tower in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest.
Annual Catmandu Campout (Catmandu is one of my Burning Man camps). We smoked a whole pig.
My Mom came to visit me in San Francisco. We ate cannabis mints and went to the science museum.
I also took her on a trip with some friends to Yuba River where we camped and swam in crystal clear waters.
Backpacked into the Tablelands in Sequoia National Park. Made a cheesy 2-minute video about it.
Moved into a larger bedroom and installed both a rock climbing hold and a yoga trapeze (fitness +2).
Spent a week on Kauai. Hiked some of the most beautiful trails of my life and fell in love with the ocean again.
Paddle boarded for the first time. Highly under-rated activity.
Attended a Bike Party in SF. Everyone gets a little drunk and rides around in a big bike mob screaming “Bike Party” while playing loud bass music. Also under-rated.
Started rock-climbing (indoors for now) and playing tennis again.
Made two separate trips to Joshua Tree National Park (just before it got closed and vandalized)
Spent my 33rd birthday snowboarding and snowshoeing with friends (and stayed in a totally hygge cabin with a fireplace, jacuzzi and wood burning sauna).
Fell in love with saunas. US culture has some catching up to do here.
Life
Did a lot of blood tests because I had “critically low” neutrophils (a type of white blood cell) for most of the year. I’m currently back in a normal range, but I still have no idea why this even happened in the first place.
Got a turbinate reduction procedure to try to improve breathing at the recommendation of an ENT. One of the weirder decisions I’ve made and a very unpleasant experience, but luckily in retrospect it was worth it. My original logic here was that the breath is upstream of everything that matters. Even a 5% improvement in breathing would have cascading positive benefits on everything else. I think I got more like 15-20%.
I ended a (nearly) 5-year relationship.
Experimenting with intermittent fasting to presumably clear out senescent cells and hopefully live longer. I use the free app Zero to track this, currently averaging a 15-16 hour daily fast.
Biggest Failures
I did not sell my cryptocurrency holdings near the peak. This may well turn out to be the most expensive financial mistake of my life. So it goes.
I tried to fly to Iceland with only 60 days left on my passport instead of the required 90 so they wouldn’t let me board the plane. This turned into a backup trip to Austin, which admittedly is way less exciting than driving a camper van around Iceland. Hopefully the last travel lesson I needed to learn.
We Live in the Future
You can now fit the entirety of English Wikipedia on a phone and view it all offline. This is the closest thing we’ve got to a Hitchhiker’s Guide.
Don’t let cost prevent you from endlessly reading. You can download a digital copy of almost any book for free at either libgen.pw (offline at the moment) or b-ok. Best resource I found last year.
Music
- In 2018 I listened to 3,606 different songs on Spotify. Some of my top albums were HVOB, Para for Cuva, Random Rab, Jamie XX, and, wait for it, the Moana Original Motion Picture Soundtrack.
Goals for 2019
Much of my attention over the last last couple of years was spent pursuing professional/career goals. As a result, my mind is more prone to reaction and distraction and I’m not as physically fit as I want to be, so I’ve set the following goals:
Meditate 5x/week in 2019. I’m currently using the Waking Up app.
- Two-handed kettlebell swings 2x/week (aiming to hit 75 reps of 50lbs, tracking using Strong)
Questions for you:
What is something you intentionally changed in 2018? What happened as a result?
What are your goals for 2019? Be specific.
Do you have any predictions for 2019?
Alright, that concludes a fairly long first issue. The next one will be less of an info-dump. One of my intentions is to connect with more people outside of social media, so feel free reply with any thoughts or questions or forward this to whoever. New folks can always subscribe here.
Thanks for reading and see ya next month!
Cheers,
Collin
02 – February 25, 2019 (top)
Hey Friends,
One of my favorite ideas, one which I return to again and again and again, is the concept of finite versus infinite games. Finite games include things like chess, football, most professional goals, the Oscars, and nearly every video game ever. The objective is to “win” and the victory condition is zero sum: for someone to win the other players must lose.
Infinite games are much more interesting. The objective of an infinite game is not to win, but instead to continue playing. The evolution of life is an infinite game. Your life is an infinite game. Friendships are infinite games. Some structures like governments and businesses are infinite games. Creative acts are often infinite games. The goal is to just keep playing.
That simple intention, “just keep playing,” is perhaps the closest thing to the Meaning of Life that I’ve got. It’s a prime objective I forget, relearn, and return to again and again as I get caught in all of life’s different finite games. One can either sit idle and wish the world had more play, more magic, more whatever, or one can stand up and realize, perhaps not for the first time, that they have been the magician all along.** **
You are the man (woman, human) behind your own curtain.
I hope your 2019 is rockin’ so far. I took an Amtrak from the Bay up to Oregon to visit my Mom. During that time we explored Mount Hood, met a snowman, and (at her suggestion) drunkenly made vision boards. This involves cutting up magazines to presumably invoke the law of attraction. On mine I managed to feature what has now become a prescriptive mantra, “Give a F*ck,” which also happens to be Step 1 for magic making:
In other news I woke up to two earthquakes two mornings in a row. A magnitude 3.7 and then a 3.5. Nothing compared to Chile a couple years back but, combined with a few weeks of rain, it’s been feeling lightly apocalyptic in San Francisco. Lots of meditation, indoor climbs, kettlebell swings, sauna sessions, and a 27-hour fast though.
January concluded with a snowshoe backpacking trip to Aloha Lake in the Desolation Wilderness. We carried in firewood and got lucky with the weather (no wind!) so we managed to stay somewhat warm not totally frostbitten at our serene campsite on the surface of the frozen lake.
To wrap up, here’s a few things I found worth checking out this month:
Film
- The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Netflix) – Ranging from absurd to profound, these Western vignettes from the Coen brothers follow the adventures of outlaws and settlers on the American frontier. Some of the shorts are dry, some weird, but if you like westerns or anything the Coens have ever created, this collection is definitely worth watching.
Music
- Rainfall on Red Earth – by Auntie Flo – Great when you want to read/write/work/focus
Ideas
- We think of our body as purely controlled by our mind, but really, the mind is a device that the body added to itself to extend what it could do — to improve its evolutionary fitness. Pretty interesting way to extend the playtime of this particular infinite game.
Podcasts
- Tyler Cowen and Rob Wilborn – Rob of 80,000 Hours has a conversation with economist Tyler about his new book Stubborn Attachments. In addition to discussing the ideas in the book, the conversation ranges far and wide across Tyler’s thinking, including why we won’t leave the galaxy and the unresolvable clash between the claims of culture and nature. Highly recommended.
Links
The Measure of a Life Well Lived: Henry Miller on Growing Old, the Perils of Success, and the Secret of Remaining Young at Heart
Punjabi Remake of Titanic Dance Song – Drowsy Maggie (Youtube music video) – Cultural mashup in which an Indian girl in a sari plays a techno-themed Punjabi variant of an Irish jig on a bagpipe while Scotsmen in kilts dance in the background.
3-dimensional view of radio frequencies (45 sec video / Twitter)
Becoming (6 min video) – Watch a single cell become a complete organism in a six minute timelapse
No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime – It expands by 10,000 times in a fraction of a second and it’s 100,000 times softer than Jell-O.
Better Language Models and Their Implications – OpenAI (an AI safety non-profit) trained a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text about everything from unicorns to Miley Cyrus shoplifting.
As always, feel free to reply/forward. New folks can always subscribe here.
Thanks for reading!
Cheers,
Collin
03 – July 11, 2019 (top)
Hey friends,
There are some moments life when everything outside of the present moment falls blissfully away, like when you’re sailing through crisp mountain air atop an inflatable penguin. There is no past, there is no future, and if you’re really lucky, there is no self. There is only feeling. In this case the feeling of being at the apex of flight, big-spooning an aquatic bird.
On a good day meditation is like capturing that tenth of a second of presence and extending it further. On bad days it’s like starring in a reality TV show with one mind helplessly playing the entire frivolous and boring cast. I think the goal here is probably to be the penguin.
Since my last correspondence, way back in February, I experienced a similar moment of absolute presence on my morning commute. A car struck me from behind while I was cycling to work. I flipped over the front of my handlebars and tumbled headfirst toward the pavement. The moment of presence came in the instant that my body was upside down and moving sideways, my helmeted head and shoulder sliding along the road.
Minutes after the crash I stood in the street with tributaries of blood oozing out of me. The driver berated me for being in front of his car. Other cyclists stopped in solidarity and berated him for almost killing me. I simply contemplated my mortality (and laughed at myself for forgetting about it yet again).
That was a few months ago now. It’s useful, though, to think about death. To stop and ask, “What is really going on?” or maybe, “What will my 80-year-old self think of this decision/year/life?”
In May I flew to Belize for a week to celebrate my sister’s birthday. She got her scuba certification and I refreshed mine. On one of the training dives I noticed a large shadow swimming over my right shoulder. My pulse appropriately raised, I turned to see the world’s oldest dolphin staring back at me from an arm’s length away. It nodded at me and swam on to surprise my sister and our dive master.
Its thick rubber skin bore dozens of gray-white scars. It swam with and around us for the remaining 15 minutes of the dive doing its best to communicate with squeaks and trills. I’ve never had so much sustained eye contact with a wild animal. What I saw was a deep intelligence, calm and curious, seeming to ask,
“Hey, what is really going on?”
Cheers,
Collin
Listen
Luminous Beings – Jon Hopkins 2019 single
Learning how to listen, or how to watch, is a somewhat different skill for each musical genre or entertainment medium. Similar to the skill of “reading” a graphic novel, listening to EDM or jazz requires some type of shift in the brain. Repetition or fragmentation or discordant notes aren’t inherently pleasurable sounds, but the second order effects in the brain can be pleasurable.
The Reply All Hotline – Podcast episode. So authentic and friendly, I found myself smiling and laughing and sometimes just feeling throughout the episode.
Watch
The Bill Murray Stories – You know those stories you hear about Bill Murray showing up at random parties or photobombing couples or stealing someone’s French fries? This is a documentary about that, and why Bill does it. It had me cry-laughing on a plane by minute 20 and realizing that my life outlook has a lot of overlap with everyone’s favorite actor.
Kurt Vonnegut, Shape of Stories (17min) – Second half of a humorous lecture Vonnegut gave a few years before he died in 2004. Worth a watch. Nobody has it figured out but Vonnegut got closer than most.
Power of tens (9 minutes) – An adventure in magnitudes from 1977. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe and back again until we go deep into the hand of the sleeping picnicker.
Read
2019 Pulitzer Prize Winners – I selected The Overstory from the past list of fiction winners and read most of it during the Belize trip. Monumental. Highly recommended to anyone who loves trees.
Secrets of the Worlds Greatest Art Thief – Stéphane Breitwieser robbed nearly 200 museums, amassed a collection of treasures worth more than $1.4 billion, and became perhaps the most prolific art thief in history.
Think
Cities are literal memory palaces.
WeCroak – an app that randomly reminds you that you’re going to die.
Life Update
Date: October 2024 Source: Substack
The last time I sent anything to this list was summer of 2019. I’m sending this in part to remember what, exactly, has happened since then. Here’s a speedrun that gets progressively weighted toward more recent memory:
In January 2020 I quit my job at Instacart to travel the world.
One week later I realized COVID was going to consume everything.
I spent a month monitoring the spread, making unorthodox stock market bets, and ensuring that everyone around me thought I was crazy.
By March everything was cancelled but my sanity was vindicated.
Unemployed, I hunkered down in San Francisco, actually did start to feel insane, and started publishing a vlog on YouTube.
I started dating. Lots of park dates and walking dates. Turns out everyone else was insane too.
Started working part-time, contract-style for Instacart again.
Left SF and did a road trip across the northern USA with my adventure-Mom (we hit Crater Lake, Mt Rainier, The Cascades, Yellowstone, and The Badlands.
Returned home to SF. Met a lady. Quickly deleted the YouTube vlog and got a haircut.
Convinced the lady to come to Sedona for a month with me and my friends.
Started working full-time for Instacart again.
Fell in love with the girl. Her name is Amy.
Organized a Labor Day micro-festival weekend for friends.
Went to Greece for 3 weeks, almost crashed a motorbike.
My Dad’s dementia accelerated, moved him to an assisted-care facility.
Amy moved in with me! Then we abandoned San Francisco all together and traveled nomadically for awhile.
We lived in San Diego.
We lived in Waikiki.
We lived in Austin.
Finally, we lived in several spots in Oakland and Berkeley. We decided we couldn’t leave the Bay Area yet.
Got a septoplasty, turbinate reduction and cryotherapy super combo surgery to try and improve my nasal breathing powers. I have an impressively disturbing video of me pulling out the gauze.
We went to Peru for two weeks. Hiked some cool shit and climbed Machu Picchu.
I took Amy to Burning Man. She thrived. One sunrise I got down on one knee and asked her if she wanted to keep doing this indefinitely. Terribly sleep-deprived, she said YES!
We moved into a townhouse near Lake Merritt and built a domestic routine.
In 2023, I spent two weeks wandering South Korea with my future best man. We drank enormous amounts of soju, ate a metric ton of kbbq (mostly his doing), visited multiple bathhouses, one meerkat cafe, and climbed this volcano.
A week with friends on Cape Cod, ate a greater variety of home-cooked meals than all the rest of 2023 combined, including the freshest clams of my life
Used GPT4 a lot; designed three stickers w/ Midjourney and DALL-E
And then finally, and most recently, I spent a week on the Yucatán Peninsula getting married to Amy!
There’s a lot I could say about this journey since meeting Amy in 2020, so I’ll just share this paragraph from marriage_vows_v5.doc:
We have now lived together in eleven different homes, visited seven states, traveled four countries, survived three surgeries…as well as two trips to Burning Man, and one very long pandemic. I’ve squeezed up next to you on planes, buses, ATVs, a motorbike, an electric scooter, a sled, and a hot air balloon. I’ve seen you rock hiking boots, high heels, snowshoes, homemade tie-dyed pajamas, the infamous penguin onesie, and now…a wedding dress. You have proven to be the most fun, most adventurous, most spontaneous, most resilient partner anyone could ask for.
We are now feeling mostly settled living in the Oakland Hills, with an insanely great view and an insanely cute cat. Now we just need more friends to help take over the neighborhood. That, or flying car progress needs to accelerate.
At our wedding, my best man gave an incredible and esoteric speech in which he suggested in front of everyone that perhaps I had found my answers to the questions of, “What’s the point of all this? What are we doing here? Why exist at all?”
I hope he’s right!
Cheers, Collin
Listen
Rach Against the Machine B2B w/ FOB Moses set — Two friends of mine spinning hip-hop and rap. Great for working out! Bad for children! (52min)
My Kentucky Home - An old classic that dominated Louisville radio in, like, 2005. Karaoke’d it on NYE and it still slaps.
Rohan — Nora Van Elken’s chill deep house remix of a LOTR classic, makes my inner high school self rejoice.
Read
The Three-Body Problem Trilogy — A science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope, takes some work but gets better as you go. Hold onto your brain.
Asterios Polyp — A novel that could only have been told visually, a weirdly symbiotic relationship of text and images.
There Is No Antimemetics Division — How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you’re at war? Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not your first day.
Watch
Atlanta — An often surrealist, comedy-drama television series created by Donald Glover, one of the greatest living creatives at the moment.
Jury Duty — A clever improvisational reality show in which everyone aside from our unaware protagonist is an actor. Hilarious and heartwarming.
The Last of Us S01E03 (Long, Long Time) — I can’t believe we live in a world where Actually Good television can be based on a post-apocalyptic survival horror video game. This particular episode with Nick Offerman is the strongest in the season and one that I suspect could stand on it’s own. Hold onto your heartstrings.
Severance — For those who like thrillers, consciousness, and feeling, um, a little uncomfortable?
Play
- Ark Nova — Board game, 1-4 Players; who knew that competing to build the most successful zoological establishment could be so engrossing. Which is lucky because it takes a while to play.
Azul — A quicker board game that involves strategic tile placement. Good for weeknights.
Returnal (PS5, PC) — Third-person roguelike in which you play an astronaut trapped in a time loop. It’s basically Elden Ring but as a bullet hell sci-fi and way more fun. But not easy.
Think
What did you care about intensely ten years ago but don’t care about today?
What is something that you believe to be true that very few people agree with you on?