Wherever this finds you, I hope it finds you well. Austin’s weather has cooled off over the past couple weeks and we’re finally breathing that crisp fall air every morning. Happy Scorpio season to those that celebrate.

I’ve been thinking a lot about pain and healing because ten weeks ago, I underwent surgery to remove hemorrhoids. I wasn’t planning on being so open about it, but I’ve learned that hemorrhoid rates are skyrocketing and much more common than you’d expect. Consider this your PSA to spend less time sitting and to breathe through all your workouts.

Anyway, the first couple weeks after surgery were brutal. Easily the worst pain I’ve ever endured. It felt like my body wasn’t mine anymore. I was just a shell of a human setting alarms around the clock to ensure I didn’t miss any doses of my six prescriptions.

I wore diapers out of an abundance of caution. My body did things on its own without consulting me. I frequently closed my eyes during sitz baths and wondered if all this was worth it. Maybe I should’ve accepted its ever-presence for the rest of my life like so many other people I’ve talked to.

Here’s the thing…

Were the first few weeks after surgery brutal? Absolutely. But here I am 10 weeks later, almost pain free. This morning I did my first strength training class since last year and my body actually held up!

So compared to the year I spent before surgery feeling incapable of fully participating in my body, the surgery and pain were absolutely worth it.

Did I enjoy the pain required to undergo and heal from surgery? Absolutely not. But was it necessary to finally move my life forward and reintegrate my mind with my body? Definitely.

It turns out this lesson shows up everywhere in life.

To even have a chance to heal… fully heal… we have to hurt. Nature teaches us that strengthening a muscle requires the initial muscle fibers to literally rip so that that they can rebuild stronger than before. Attempting to heal from past traumas still require us to revisit and remember those traumas—often in painstaking detail. Doing something new that grows you still requires the pain of uncertainty, doubt, and imposter syndrome.

I know that in today’s world, it can feel like all we ever do is hurt. Heck, many of us feel like we’ve only known a lifetime of hurt.

Maybe, just maybe… the fact that you’re still here is the proof that you’re already healing. That you’re enduring when so many others couldn’t. That, as stormy as it is, you’re still putting one step in front of the other without getting washed away by the pressure of life. That is worth celebrating.

After all, you are a human being. You come from a long line of ancestors that adapted to everything life threw at them. Ancestors that endured a quality of life that most of us only read about in history books. Ancestors that couldn’t even imagine the technology you’re using to read or listen to this post. Whether they survived nature, warfare, illness, famine, or all of the above—you come from them and are just as capable. Just as hard-wired for growth and adaptation. Just as resilient and gritty. I know that’s hard to believe when we spend our days with algorithms that make us feel less-than, but it’s the real, honest truth.

When viewed from that lens, life is currently teaching us endurance. It’s growing our collective ability to adapt and step forward. To take control of the things we can, and inspire others for the things we can’t.

I know that feels kumbaya. Like wishful thinking. And maybe it is.

But I ask myself this: if pain isn’t seen through this lens, then what other perspectives would actually help right now? Apathy and escapism have their place but they don’t ultimately move our life forward. You know what does move our life forward? Taking whatever next step the day requires… imperfections and all.

Have a great week.

With sonder 🤟

Ruben

I hope this finds you incredibly well, and Happy Labor Day to those that celebrate. A strong hello to all the new subscribers since last week’s post — welcome aboard!

This week’s reflection is about something I’ve wrestled with for many years and I suspect many of you have as well.

How do you manage the distant future when you aren’t taking tangible steps toward that direction today?

You might paint some broad strokes, set a vision and intention, make a mood board, etc… but it’s hard to see the future’s details when today’s details are still wicked blurry.

I’ve actually run into this problem with this very newsletter!

I spent so many years consulting some of the biggest companies in the world on their distribution and marketing strategies that I incessantly debated with myself on which platforms to post to, how often, what tools are best for scale, what project management frameworks to go with…and on and on and on and on.

You know how many written words all that self-debating led to?

Zero. Absolutely… zero.

See… the thing I find myself doing even when no one is looking or paying me is reflect on life in hopes of learning from it today to be a little better tomorrow. Sometimes “today” really means “this month” or “year” or “decade” and the better “tomorrow” you’re working towards is more like “next year” or “decade” or “someday maybe.”

Given that, the questions I’m left with is “why am I so caught up with how this thing may or may not grow? Who cares about marketing strategies, distribution channels, and management frameworks when you don’t even know what’s gonna come out of you? How are you supposed to find a container for something when it doesn’t even exist yet… when it’s just a yearning in your heart that won’t go away?

After so much toiling for so many years, I’ve learned you shouldn’t worry about the distant future because the universe will inevitably figure that out for you. You should worry about the work. The craft. The repetitions you get doing that thing that puts you in a state of flow.

As you do more of that, I’ve learned that the path to take… the actual shape of the thing and what doors open and close… become clearer as you go. You just have to trust your soul and take the step that’s right in front of you.

That’s what I’m doing here and encouraging you to do as well. That’s what the idea behind Learning La Vida is all about. While it’s phenomenal to set an intention and plan for the future you want to build, you MUST start with the choices that’ll actually nudge you forward.

Everything else is a distraction at best and overwhelming fear at worst. Trust the process, balance your brain by considering your heart, and do the thing that secretly exhilarates you.

—

Thanks, friend, for being here reading this reflection. I wish you abundant love, strength, and inner peace as you navigate this unpredictable experience we all call life.

If any of this resonated or you have ideas for things to write about, drop me a note at learninglavida@ruben.energy.

With sonder 🤟🏽

Ruben Dario

Subscribe

Growing up, I couldn’t get enough self help books. My mom always told my brother and I to avoid making her mistakes and to instead “educate yourself so you can make something out of yourself.”

Studying success is generally harmless. Some lessons stick with you and help you be a better person. Some authors share things you’ve heard many times before but didn’t appreciate until you heard it from them.

But as an adult learning to navigate the world every day like the rest of you, I’ve noticed a downside to success chasing that’s worth acknowledging.

For so long in life, I thought I was a book away from being the most successful version of myself. One choice away, one life change. It didn’t matter that success books all started sounding the same—I was convinced that everything I wanted to be in life was only a few months of hard work away. I just had to grind it out until then.

Many of us fall into this trap. We believe we’re only a course away. A job change away. A relationship away… From everything we’ve always wanted. From being on the track we were finally meant to be on.

Aspirations are fine and good. They keep us pushing and growing.

But bad mental habits left unchecked can cause your aspirations to become thieves of your present joy and self worth.

I aspired so much to have an even bigger and better house someday that I stopped noticing all the wonderful things about my current home. All the little things my partner and I have done to make it the intentional oasis we built together.

I aspired so much to make a lot more money in today’s economy that I stopped remembering how broke we really were as children. And how my childhood self is already making more money than he imagined at this age.

I aspired so much to be a better friend and family member that I would scold myself every time I missed a phone call, took too long to answer texts, or didn’t even return some calls. I found it easier to hide when all my friends and family wanted was to wish me well and enjoy each other’s presence.

It’s useful to want even better for yourself and hold yourself accountable to reaching your goals.

However, we need to be extremely careful that accountability doesn’t gradually morph into personal resentment and a sense of failure. Missing a day or two of a new habit often leads us to think we’re lazy and/or incapable of improvement.

When that happens, our subconscious starts to fear the very aspirations we want because it’s afraid of the scolding and resentment that comes with failing over and over.

And when THAT happens, we turn to familiar avenues of coping and escapism. Next thing you know we’re further from our goals than we ever imagined, even though we’ve been trying so hard to hold ourselves accountable.

So that’s this week’s message. When you find yourself thinking about the future “when I have my life together,” acknowledge the utility of aspiring boldly to a better future, AND also allow yourself gratitude for where you are today. Don’t let the future joy you wish in your life prevent you from looking and finding joy today.

Joy’s timeframe is not mutually exclusive between the future and the present, and your future will be better off when your present is galloping toward it instead of searching for escape from an inevitable doom.

Thanks friend for reading this reflection on life. I wish you abundant love, strength, and inner peace as you navigate this unpredictable experience we all call life.

If any of this resonated or you have ideas for things to write about, drop me a note.

With sonder 🤟🏽

Ruben Dario

In any relationship, personal or professional, don’t break people and then reprimand them for being broken.

Most challenges in life invite us to look inward first, but the human tendency is to project our concerns outward and blame the people around us for not being better.

We don’t usually do this to be evil, we do this because our brain perceives stress and worry as dangerous and it does whatever necessary to make us survive and feel safe.

Blaming others for our shortcomings definitely makes us feel safe. Powerful even. Combine that with *actually* having power over someone (e.g. authority, money, title) and you have an addictive recipe for never looking inward. Worse — have that power for too long and eventually you’ll forget life without it. Your perspective of the world and the people around you gets permanently skewed and you develop a blind spot that you don’t even know to check anymore.

It wasn’t until my 20s that I better understood the concepts of gaslighting and projecting onto others. The older I get, the clearer I see that those terms aren’t just present in personal and romantic relationships. They’re ever-present in ALL types of relationships. Outside of romantic relationships, it's perhaps most prominent in corporate settings where we’re all so busy separating work from “life” that we forget that we’re still human beings during business hours.

During business hours, we prefer to think of you as a “resource” that can be “utilized” to meet our “strategic objectives.” We move you around as we wish, reassigning you like you’re just a cell in an Excel document (fun fact: sometimes you really are just a cell — take a look at how companies talk to investors every quarter! Or how your company’s business analyst talks about growth!). Doing things this way makes it easier on the human psyche when we have to “terminate your role” because “our business needs have changed.”

Like most people that’ll read this, I’ve been on both sides. The resource manager and the resource. The one breaking people, and the one being broken. I think the more honest we are with ourselves, the more honest we can be with others. And the more honest we can be with others, the safer we *actually* become.

Funny how that works right? I like to say the Universe has a great sense of humor.

We all need to *be* better, we all need to *do* better. For our own sake and the sake of everyone around us.

With sonder 🤟🏽

Ruben

#people #power #life #business #learninglavida

My mom just found this old cover letter I wrote in 2014 and it's a perfect reminder of the Steve Jobs quote, "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."

It was early December, I was 23 living in Boston, my best friend gave me an internal referral for the job, and I thought I'd be a perfect fit for the AppNexus role. I poured my heart into this cover letter (or so my 23-year-old self thought). They were in NYC and my dream was that as soon as I got an offer letter I'd move back to New York City—maybe even be home by Christmas!

I didn't get the job. In fact, I didn't even get past the initial phone screen. I was super bummed, and felt even worse that I had to stay in Boston to endure the coldest winter they'd had in 40 years...

BUT here's where the universe kicks in — only because I was still in Boston two months later, I met my now-wife, Bruna Martinez and our journey together has surpassed any life goal or dream I could've ever imagined.

A year after that rejection I was getting ready for my first day at Meta here in Austin, TX where I would spend almost 5 years growing revenue and programs at a scale I never thought possible. And with Bruna's partnership since the night we met, we've both re-architected our life several times, we own a home decades before either of us thought was possible, and our careers have evolved in ways that it never would've had I gotten that job. Like giving it all up years later and becoming a software engineer!

Sometimes, when things don't go your way the best thing you can do is focus on the step right in front of you and trust the dots will connect in their own unique way later on. As Ryan Holiday says, "the obstacle in the way becomes the way."

#thisisyourlife

With sonder,
Ruben

In two days, it'll mark exactly 20 months since my last day at Meta (Facebook). I left because I'd been dreaming for years about days where I wasn't in back-to-back meetings from start to finish. Where I could sit with hard problems and have the skills to solve them instead of sitting there hoping other people might. Where I might do "Deep Work" for hours at a time instead of getting pinged every 5 minutes by a different stakeholder.

Some people are built for that lifestyle and I put on a good show as if I was one of them, but deep-down was a nightly existential crisis. I had just turned 30 and knew that no matter how much money I was making, if I was doing the same thing in 10 years I would forever regret it.

I took everything I knew from years as a Life Coach and finally applied it to myself. Software Engineering emerged as the clear intersection of everything I enjoy by nature and everything I was looking for in lifestyle (especially because philosophizing about life wasn't guaranteed to pay bills 😅).

Only one catch: to make the switch I'd have to grind harder than ever before, learn faster than I ever had, and find a company willing to believe my self-determination and endorse my dream.

I rolled up my sleeves to get to work and was fortunate to find a company willing to explore my potential. After a year and a half as a normal Software Engineer under an apprenticeship agreement, I’m happy to share that I got promoted to a Full Stack Software Engineer at Abilitie!

No more existential crises, no more non-stop back-to-backs. No more feeling like you're eating glass in order to get closer to your dreams, wondering all-the-while if you blew up your life for the wrong reasons.

Now's the fun part. Building on top of the reality that only existed in my dreams... until today.

As the common saying goes: we overestimate what we can do in 2 months, but underestimate what we might do in 2 years (or 5 or 10). If you've been waiting on a sign to shake up your life and follow your heart no matter the work and obstacles involved, trust me when I say it's worth it on the other side. #thisisyourlife

With sonder,

Ruben

Originally published on my LinkedIn on August 30th, 2022

Part I: Who I am and why I bothered to leave a decade-long, flourishing tech career to become a Software Engineer

(The first ~10 years)

I spent the first 5 years of my career at various startups in both customer-facing and internal operations roles. Then in January 2016, I moved to Austin with my now-wife to take a job at Facebook (now "Meta"). I was a Program Manager in the Small Business Group accountable for hundreds of millions in annual revenue and thousands of customer interactions per week. In 2018, I also got trained as a professional life coach and ran a coaching side-business on nights and weekends.

I enjoyed it all because I love designing systems and structures that amplify human greatness.

But something was never quite right. My happy place is being in the creative studio meticulously crafting something. Yet...

The more I grew in my career, the more my time was spent looking at summary docs, spreadsheets, and slideshows. Artifacts prepared by other people with the intent of reviewing work of yet other people. So much of my day was spent being an information highway that I lost touch with my own creative expression.

The turning point

Enter the pandemic. Looking for something to captivate my brain away from all the tragedies, I started doing coding tutorials. I quickly remembered how much fun I had as a pre-teen writing HTML from scratch in notepad. Remembered how I even paid for a domain with a money order that I would purchase and physically mail every month. Remembered the satisfaction of my childhood Windows ‘95 computer making alien noises to connect to something called AOL. Remembered how I learned how to tie a tie because I Googled it.

The decision

Eventually, I noticed that I was looking forward to my tutorials at night more than most things I was doing at work during the day. As a coach you’re trained to pay attention to the feelings and signals in your life because they might be trying to express something important. After months of this, I turned 31 and thought, “if not now, when? What are you really waiting for?” So I left Meta without a backup plan, but I had a few months of savings, an incredibly loving partner, and a strong family support system. Above all, I was grateful for what I did have given how the world was doing overall.

Part II: Becoming an actual Software Engineer

A year ago today, I started as a Software Engineer at Abilitie. My friend, former colleague, and now boss, Luke Owings, connected me to the company. The team got to know me personally and agreed to bring me on despite how green I was in the field. They bet on the fact that I bet on myself to learn, and trusted me to contribute in other ways while I sharpened my engineering skills. Piece by piece across the front-end and back-end, we’ve spent 7 months building something that will radically improve our company’s ability to serve clients. So here I am… finally in the studio meticulously crafting something 🤓.

Over the past year, I’ve gone from the constant feeling that I blew up my life beyond repair, to meaningfully contributing to an app our team built from scratch. As hard as it’s been to learn to code 10 years into my career, it would’ve been so much harder to go another 10 years without being honest with myself.

What have I learned? Or what advice would I give my past self? Two things: space and grace.

1. Believe people when they tell you there’s no escaping the work. You MUST get the repetitions in. Like most impactful things in life, coding isn’t one of those things you read about in a blog and get a good gist for. It’s day-in, day-out practice. Too many days without coding and you slow down the very muscle memory you desperately need to accelerate.

2. Think big, start small. It’s okay to have grand ideas. But start with what you can build or fix today. Do whatever you need to do to gain and maintain momentum because momentum needs to be on your side for this transformation to ever work.

3. Give yourself some grace and completely accept that it really IS like learning to read. We all take for granted that we’re reading right now, but think back to when you didn’t yet know how to read. How did you learn? How many repetitions did it take till it stuck? How many mispronunciations? Now imagine syntax, algorithms, and data structures in a brain that’s not as empty a sponge as it was back then.

4. It’s okay to admit you’re learning and growing. I was so afraid to tell people I switched to Software Engineering because I probably didn’t even believe it about myself at the time. 1 year in, and I can finally say: there’s so much I don’t yet know and may never know, but I finally have enough repetitions to trust the human process of evolving through deliberate action and overcoming challenges.

5. Remember the best rollercoasters have the biggest drops and the twistiest turns. Some lows get really low, but nothing beats when you’ve squashed a bug that was beating you down for ages. Or even better - when you’ve created something that real people are really using to really serve clients or themselves better than they could yesterday.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. LMK if anything resonated, and wishing you the very best on whatever journey you're on.

With sonder,
Ruben Dario Martinez 🤟🏽

For the voice recording of this post, click on the Spotify widget below. To play the recording in a different podcast provider, find all other providers here. Strongly recommended for this post as it’s a long, meandering piece ranging from physics to one’s philosophy of life.

A couple weeks ago, after 10 years in Sales, Operations, and Program Management, I left a very good job in the tech industry to pursue a new career in software engineering. I’m also sun-setting my standalone coaching practice for now so I can be all-in on this new path.

I don’t know what the future holds, but after years of reflection and experimentation, I’m letting go of the life I’ve built over the last 30 years to make space for the life I want over the next 60.

I created Learning La Vida as a capturing point for many of my reflections in this next chapter of my life. Writing and speaking help me untangle my brain, so publishing here is as much for me as it is for you. Thank you for being here, and always drop me a (respectful) note with any thoughts, ideas, and feedback at learninglavida@gmail.com. Social and whatnot coming eventually (new career first priority).

This first post is very meta for some people, but it’s important to anchor you around the frame of reference/ thought exercise I’ve used over the years to let go of the scripts I was relentlessly following and give myself permission to pursue new choices. Enjoy and don’t forget to subscribe for future ideas on life and the human condition.

Let’s start with a blank slate in the grandest scheme of things.

ZOOM WAY OUT

Despite our best science, we can only thoroughly explain about 5% of our universe. Everything else we call dark matter or dark energy.

You know how DNA makes each of us, “us”? Well… did you know every single human shares about 99.9% of DNA with every single one of the 7 billion people alive on Earth today? 96% shared DNA with a chimpanzee? 60% with a banana? Business insider summarized a TED talk on this, explaining that a “printed version of your entire genetic code would occupy some 262,000 pages… Of those pages, just about 500 would be unique to you.”

We’ve discovered an enormous amount about reality. So much so that we recently developed a vaccine to protect against a global pandemic in record time.

Yet we’re not much closer to understanding where consciousness comes from.

We’ve created atomic weapons by learning to split single atoms and thereby wield unthinkable destruction upon Earth and humanity. Yet we’ve each got 7 billion, billion, billion atoms in the average human body. And if you’re anything like me, our late night food binges lead to a different type of destruction with our atoms. I digress, anyway —

Big numbers are hard to see in perspective when you read them in writing. Let’s contextualize with a beach visualization: picture yourself on some sandy beach anywhere on Earth. Breathe in that fresh smell of water. Listen as the waves crash. You there?

Okay, now pick up some sand in your hands. Look up close. Think of all the itty bitty grains of sand in your palms. How many do you think are in there? Millions? Billions? More?

If this is just in the palm of your hand on this one beach, how many grains of sand do you think exist across all the beaches in the entire world?

An incomprehensible amount of grains of sand, right!?

Okay, go ahead and let the sand slip between your fingers.

Sit back. Relax. Breathe.

Soak in the sun. That bright, deliciously warm, bringer-of-joy in the sky. Our one sun. How amazing that all humans across the world share the experience of the sun in some capacity.

Do you remember when you first learned that our Earth orbits the sun? And it’s got so much space to travel that it takes an entire year to make one lap? And do you remember how mind-blowing it was when it turned out there are a bunch of planets, some much bigger than Earth, doing the same thing? THAT is how big and strong our one sun is!? Giant planets are pulled into orbit with it for billions of years!?

These days people have figured out how to take the energy from the sun and power entire cities. And the sun is so big and energized that we could do that comfortably for billions more years.

With all this in mind, how massive the sun must truly be, right? It’s almost an incomprehensible amount of size and energy. More mind-blowing still: Every star in the night sky is another sun, just like ours. Often much bigger than ours. Yet so far away that we experience them as tiny twinkles in our night skies.

Mm. What a reflective mood on this beautiful beach.

ZOOM IN

Now, let’s go ahead and focus on our breathing.

Slowly in. Then out. Breathe. Repeat.

Mm. Isn’t it nice to breathe? Don’t you wish you remembered to breathe more often?

Heh, you know, that said - isn’t it nice that our body remembers to breathe even when we don’t? Whether we’re conscious of it or not, our body keeps itself breathing.

It remembers so that every cell in our body receives the oxygen it needs to stay alive. Our cells get oxygen, so we stay alive every single second of every single day till our last dying breath.

Mmmm.

Life is sweet. Let’s say thank you to our cells for all they do all day long.

While talking about cells - isn’t it wild how every cell is made up of more atoms? That an atom is the unit of matter that we share with all of the physical universe? With the sun itself, the moon, and every organism that we share Earth with? Atoms remind us that everything—yes everything—is rooted in the same stuff and part of an incomprehensibly broader ecosystem.

Hey. So….

Remember our sun? Our glorious sun? And all of its peers in the night sky?

Remember those countless grains of sand slipping through your fingers?

Did you know there are more suns in the universe than there are grains of sand on our entire planet? Do you know how much space and distance needs to LITERALLY exist in the universe in order for that to be true!??

I know. 🤯

And so back to you and your 7 billion, billion, billion atoms… did you know that’s more than there are estimated suns in our universe!?!?

Which in summary means yes: there are more atoms inside of you than there are total suns in the entire universe. And there are more suns in the universe than there are even grains of sand on this very planet!

It only takes a few atoms to wield unimaginable force across this Earth, and yet we stay glued together all day long with an incomprehensible amount of atoms. 7 billion billion billion.

Mmmm… swim in that abundance.

OKAY RESET ZOOM

All this talk about atoms. All that we’ve discovered and built with our knowledge… remember that still only explains ~5% of what we call reality. The rest we label “dark energy” and “dark matter” in order to make the numbers work.

And that’s with today’s best scientists and computers….

Um…..

Hi 🙋🏽‍♂️

Anyone else wondering WTH is going on here?? I can’t be the only one that finds this is a little mind bending right? Going through this exercise tends to flip my sense of spatial awareness into overdrive. Especially knowing our best science still has a long way to go.

Whatever the reason all of the above is true, isn’t it obvious that humans weren’t the ones who created it all? That we’re merely learning to operate in a vast, mysterious, 95% not-yet-well-known universe?

From this perspective… isn’t it clear that the way human society works is a very “local” phenomenon in the grand scheme of universal things? That society’s current permutation of issues are specific to just planet Earth this very moment?

Isn’t it clear that human debates about what’s right and wrong are the mere product of an animal species that was more adaptable than its counterparts once the dinosaurs left and is desperately trying to figure out how to keep scaling while staying in charge? A species that continued to spread across this planet and take Earth’s resources for its own benefit—just like every other species on this planet would do if in the same position?

From this perspective, isn’t it clear that we’ve literally created agreements, policies, governments, values, life expectations, and so on primarily as a way to scale our species’ mass takeover of the ecosystem that we’ve always shared with the other billions of living beings that we can’t even communicate with? Some of whom we mass reproduce only because they taste good?

From this perspective, isn’t it clear, therefore, that every human is winging existence every single day? Isn’t it clear that, to our best knowledge, we are the most developed species to ever live on our planet, yet we didn’t build any of reality’s true underlying systems?

Today is the most advanced, interrelated day that humanity will ever face. The same will be true of tomorrow, and the day after that.

Given how little we truly know about “all this,” isn’t it clear that over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, we (human species) haven’t gotten to today through perfect choices? Quite the opposite actually — we’ve made better choices mostly as a reaction to learning how terrible our past choices were. We have systematically become better at conquering the Earth only because of trial and error and adapting more effectively than every other species on this planet to scale our expansion. Our methods change throughout the centuries, but in the grand scheme of things, the human species has done the same thing over hundreds of thousands of years: pursuing survival, scaling social cohesion through trial and error, and endlessly wondering why we’re here and what happens when we die.

So from this perspective… isn’t everything you know and consider to be true about how life and people work worth a closer look? If our best methods have only truly revealed 5% of our universal reality, how could we possibly know anyone from a series of posts they make on a platform that is algorithmically optimizing for us to spend more time in it? How could we possibly know anyone deeply based on their voting patterns? Their income bracket? Their race? Their past choices? Their family’s past choices?

You can’t. People have a literal lifetime of choices, experiences, thoughts, and habits that have come to produce who they are being in this very moment. The fullness of which can never be captured unless you were in that person’s head; the fullness of which always changes with every additional second of that person’s lived experience.

THE GOOD NEWS

That includes you. That includes all of us. Everything is constantly moving. Our atoms. Our cells. Our air molecules. Our planet orbiting our sun. Our own sun orbiting the galaxy’s black hole.

We’ll save black holes for another day but, do you see what I’m saying?

Not only is each individual’s life incomprehensibly nuanced (and therefore we all deserve space and grace), but all of reality itself is always shifting. Moving. Adapting. Turns out most scripts we’re expected to follow about our lives don’t stand the test of time because the world changes every second.

Adapting means learning and unlearning things—constantly. Sometimes the easy way. Sometimes the hard way. We paraphrase Darwin to say survival of the fittest, but the word he used was adaptable because he acknowledged being alive means navigating constant change.

Darwin taught us that being the most adaptable is—and I can’t emphasize this point enough—quite LITERALLY the common trait that made our species evolve beyond our chimpanzee brethren and take over this world to bend it for our comforts.

This is what most of my writing is likely to be about. The never ending quest we’re all on to adapt to the present moment. The highs and lows. The things that don’t have good answers. The questions we all ask ourselves more than we ever admit: how do we really live this life? What does this all really mean? What should it mean?

I wrestle with this stuff every day just like you, so capturing my thoughts here is as much for you as it is for me. Writing and speaking is how I attempt to make sense of things to untangle my brain. Like you, I’m not always successful, but through trial and error I’m trying my best to learn to adapt and create my life on purpose before I join the other 93% of humans that have already died.

Here’s the conclusion I finally found after 30 years of pursuing the script: your entire life cannot reach the social idea of perfect because social perfection requires a clear end-state that can be thoroughly validated by others that approve of the script. Yet… since reality always changes (and therefore all future possibilities), there will never be an end-state that can be validated by others as perfection. Playing the perfect game is a fool's choice—there's no winning. Instead you have to play the life game, where you make choices that bring you closer or further away from a future that only you can sketch in your own imagination. Every single moment is always the very beginning of the rest of your life, which means you've got to be an active participant on where your life is headed.

So: it’s up to you, yes you, to individually and intentionally design what a “good” life looks like for you. You can gain ideas from places like this blog, but you’re the only being that can ultimately choose what resonates with your soul today and what choices you want to make with the thoughts you’re currently experiencing and the future you’re currently imagining. It’s incredibly hard work to own your life in this way, but I’m crazy enough to believe it’s the most sincere, soul-loving way to lead your life. Otherwise you’ll blindly follow other people’s advice wondering whether checking boxes is all there was to this mysterious existence. If our atoms taught us anything, it’s that there’s much more than that to all this.

What do we do with all this?

Each of us must accept that change IS the only constant in the true grand scheme of things. That the only way TO continue our evolutionary march into the future is THROUGH an ever-changing present that we continuously adapt to and learn from.

We must each accept that learning to change is a never-ending process, but when it comes to being human, learning to change means learning to live.

Welcome to Learning La Vida, a place to discuss reality and the human condition. I’m glad you’re here. Thanks in advance for the space and grace, I’ll do my best to give you the same.

With sonder,

Ruben 🤟🏽

-Ruben

Sign up now so you don’t miss future issues.

Subscribe now

In the meantime, tell your friends!

If you want to connect with Jaxson directly, find them on Instagram at @whodatjaxx