Teaching you how to take your life back from technology using ancient wisdom, practical psychology, and spiritual disciplines. Rehumanize yourself in the AI age
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Joined March 2020
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Today I sent out the first email in my Substack newsletter!
Its purpose is to study past Christian writers and share their wisdom with a new audience.
If that sounds like something you want to read, feel free to subscribe at the link below or in my bio!
Joel - Write Awareness retweeted
The one truth every man must know to survive in this world is that he will, no matter what, no matter how many obstacles pile up in his way, he must know in his bones that he will find a way through them all. this is the only thing that matters, the only question worth asking, not what could happen or who might stand in your path, but whether or not you will, in the end. because if you start with that knowledge, if you hold it tight and let that truth seep into your marrow, then theres not a goddamn thing in this world that can stop you. not fate, not the whole weight of history coming down on your shoulders. youll shrug it off. walk through the deepest rivers of shit imaginable and come out on the other side. and heaven and earth will move for the man who refuses to flinch.
Joel - Write Awareness retweeted
Some of you clearly didn’t pay attention reading The Great Gatsby in high school…
You can’t recreate the past.
It’s gone forever.
If you desperately miss certain feelings or moments in time;
You’re going to be insane.
Because you’re longing for something that doesn’t exist.
Joel - Write Awareness retweeted
God is not going to drag your bitter half formed soul into a promised land, it would spoil the milk and spoil the honey, and you would wreck it within a year. the thirst is teaching you. the rations are building someone who can receive a promise without choking on it. blessed are those who walk it without cursing the sand, for every grain grinds a slave into a son
Joel - Write Awareness retweeted
Major cheat code for life: realizing you really can just wake up one day and say "that's enough of that" and change direction completely.
Thanks for the insightful analysis of what holds so many people back. Very relatable experience and I can see myself becoming the guy on the other side of that table.
The scent of desperation is powerful and allergy inducing
Years ago I was unfamiliar with it and I’d met a casting director who was mid 40s and a brilliant writer, who allegedly just needed his one big break (I now see why that wasn’t the case)…
Somehow I wanted to “save” him and make this happen for him. I’d met him and his wife and especially liked her, and I knew she wanted success for him beyond his day to day which’d gotten stale
So I contacted an A lister I knew personally which also happened to be his #1 choice to star in a script he’d been shopping for literally 20 years
The dude was over the moon but that excitement soon turned into desperation then arrogance which would be the nail in his coffin…
I organized a lunch with him and the A lister, and then a meeting with the one powerful entertainment lawyer in town who could make things happen (I’d produced a number of projects so I knew many folks). When we sat down in the lawyer’s office, this man did not understand the respect and appreciation the lawyer had for me and he began to talk over me to “sell his film”…the lawyer looked at me and in that moment I noticed his entire disposition change - he was out, he was not going to help this man and it was the sudden flip of a switch
To dance around his internal decision the lawyer kindly took us on a tour of his office (it was a fantastic space) and the man, obviously being desperate and out over his skis, took that to mean he was “in”; of course when the lawyer gave him no way to follow up, the man blamed me for everything
The scent of desperation is the most toxic deal killer. Poor and unsuccessful people carry this energy but they mask it with arrogance and greed and sometimes anger so they call it something else; successful and abundant people are extremely allergic to this scent and can spot it a mile away
This was my first experience with what that energy looks and feels like and it paved the way for me to notice the hallmarks of it long before it surfaces so I’d never have to encounter it again
Desperate people who don’t understand why their deals never get off the ground or they don’t get invested in never address core wounds rooted in not feeling or being enough; and the truth is, they actually do not even want success! - they don’t feel they deserve it…so they sabotage in a way that sets others up to take the fall every single time
Joel - Write Awareness retweeted
I wanted a thousand things in my life, and most of them i didn't get. and i looked at myself the way this post is asking me to, and thought i wasn't smart enough. but years passed, and i started seeing what each of those things would have done to me if i had gotten them, and every single one would have destroyed me - some fast and some slow. everything i didn't get turned out to be the smartest thing that happened to me, but it was not my smartness. it was something else deciding on my behalf, because i was not smart enough to decide for myself. sometimes not getting what you want is the only proof that something out there loves you more than you were ever capable of loving yourself
Joel - Write Awareness retweeted
The hardest lesson is that comfort and happiness are not the same thing.
A comfortable life can still leave a man empty, while suffering can become the very thing God uses to make him whole.
Joel - Write Awareness retweeted
There was a 40 year period in history when samurai, pirates, and cowboys all technically existed at the same time.
I chased everything the world promised would lead to happiness.
Wealth, success, pleasure. The more I pursued it, the less I had.
Then I opened The Confessions of Saint Augustine, and one quote shattered my view of happiness:
The path towards misery is easy and comfortable. The path towards happiness is difficult and treacherous.
I would never have chosen the difficulties I’ve faced, and I’d have done anything to avoid them.
But they’re precisely what was needed to mold me into a man God can use.
The answers you seek are found in books that have stood the test of time.
Not in the latest bestsellers, but in wisdom that has endured for eons.
Read more about The Confessions of St. Augustine and other classic works of spiritual literature here:
open.substack.com/pub/writea…
