everyone's watching! no one is watching.

Social media has made us really comfortable with watching. We watch all sorts of things all the time.  

But the arms-length, self-monitored quality of online interaction means that we are not nearly as comfortable with being watched. In fact, we are constantly bombarded with the risk inherent to being watched in today's hyper-analyzed media culture, even as we each struggle with how involved we each want to be in the watching/being watched paradigm. 

Conspiracy theories aside, there is a lesson to be learned here, though, and one that applies to our real-world lives as much as our online ones, and it's in 3 parts:

1. Just because someone can watch doesn't mean they will.  
2. Just because they do watch doesn't mean they hate what they see.
3. In the end, watching and being watched is beside the point.  

Of course, we learn about the world by watching it. And of course, we grow our world by sharing it (and letting others watch). But our life gets purpose from what happens next: what do we do with what we see when we watch? what do we say to our now-bigger audience?

my only piece of training advice

Lot's of people that I talk to want advice about fitness. Some of those people pay me, but many, many do not. After trying--and failing--many times to give off-the-cuff answers, I realized why it was so tough. 

See, my advice almost always boils down to one thing: think about your muscles for at least 30 minutes, every day. I swear, I think that "program" could work for just about anyone with any goal. But as far as workout-advice goes, it's just not that exciting.

The hard part is not knowing what to do to help people, but in knowing how to get people to give a shit about themselves. 

a new way to cook

After many years of struggling to explain why I don't really "like to cook", but still enjoy preparing my own food, I am working on a philosophy of cooking that is centered around this notion: 

Building things is fun. Cleaning them up is not. 

While there is definitely some mental shell-game happening here, I have found that if I deconstruct food prep in a particular way, I enjoy it more. In fact, the further I can get from the traditional (and tyrannical) recipe-model and still make food that is fucking tasty, the happier I am. And like almost any restaurant person would tell you, this is how the best food in the world is made. 

I'm not talking about improvising, exactly. Sure, there is a certain joy in free-wheeling a complex meal and having it turn out OK. But that kind of cooking only works in my life about twice a year, and always feels more like a party (hangover and all) than a strategy for eating well. 

Instead, I think if we focus on each part of the process (buying food, prepping and cooking ingredients, assembling them in interesting combinations and ways) just long enough to make them a little better, quality will naturally rise and so will our satisfaction. There is infinitely more joy in cooking in chunks--prepping large quantities of cheap, delicious stuff and then non-systematically combining them in awesome and different ways--than with the standard, cookbook approach. And no matter what you're measuring (time, money, mental-energy), it costs a hell of a lot less, too. 

More time building and enjoying, less time cleaning up.