Buy In
I nearly spent one hundred and twenty dollars on chocolate salt. LMNT sells flavored salt. Did I need it? Not really. At the time, my attention held by the promise of Chocolate Salt flavored water with zero calories, I almost bought a lot of chocolate, sweetener, and salt.
I’ve always felt my money should be a larger number. I’ve lived on SSDI and rent assistance since moving out of my mom’s house. The jobs I had made me feel like a functioning failure. I drowned in guilt from getting money for free. My mental state wavered from despair to guilt to loathing to escape through my computer. Where were the dreams I had from youth about who I would be? Where did they go?
I can literally say I ate most of the money I got in my 20s. Each month, I calculated exactly how much I needed to make rent, electric, and internet bills. Those are vital. Without internet, a computer bound being like myself could no longer know the context of it’s own existence. The rest of the money went to food spending.
My weight, already a large number, became larger. Health problems sending me to the ER happened. Because I had Medicare and Medicaid, surgery was free to me, so I was much more willing to go ahead with it. I’ll never know what kind of person I’d be without those surgeries.
What blocked my way at every point was a number. Money. If I had more money, I thought, I could get one of those meal delivery services. I could eat what they delivered to me, and I’d lose weight. That was the thinking back then. Someone handle my food for me, because I can’t.
It could have stayed that way. I could have kept on buying twenty burgers from the dollar value menu from Wendy’s or McDonalds. I could have stayed fat, with a low number in my bank account, declining health, wondering where my life was going. I could have kept playing games online, endlessly, occupied, mildly upset, still, occupied.
That would have been the life I led. A subsistence life of mediocrity, monthly expenditure, far enough from everyone else I might as well be a monk. What changed?
Pain. Pain is a masterful teacher. Really, pain is probably the only teacher I would listen to at that point. The pains from dealing with the healthcare system, from surgery, and from my own body rebelling in pain from the large intake of mass I ate changed my values.
I began to look for another way to live. My curiosity, kept in my mind since youth, my desire to see more of the world, always had some kindling. The embers flared as I began to journal and listen to more varied podcasts while playing games. I signed up to email newsletters, watched a wider selection of youtube videos, and read what I could, when I could.
It piled up. The knowledge piled up. The journals I eventually started, they piled up. I wrote fiction, regrettable, painful to read fiction, and posted it online. I tried poetry for a year or so, with over 500 poems on allpoetry.com/LiberalIntent. Towards the end, I did one story a day as well.
I also joined Farnam Street Learning Community. I posted there for a year. I decided it was time to move on.
My weight circled around 280lbs to 260lbs for two years there. I saved up 30 ETH by buying it with what money I had whenever I could. Lost 23 ETH to a hack. Sighed, then kept saving money into crypto. I have about 15k USD in holdings as of this writing.
My weight is so low now I had to buy a new belt. Pants were falling off. The belt I had is a Superbelt, one man operation, will not break ever. I’ve had it since 2017, same time I started saving money by buying ETH. There were weeks where I would barely be able to get it on. Now, the last loop isn’t tight enough for me.
What did I seek? Another way to live. I must still be looking for what else is there.
At each point, I bought in. I bought into a new idea. A new way of thinking. A new technique. Another way of eating. A new podcast. A new habit. A different identity of self. I became an intellectual nomad.
At every point I had days where I felt all was useless and all my efforts amounted to nothing. I still have those days. The boredom is still strong in me. I still seek another way to live. I bought in. And I didn’t buy the chocolate salt.
Will you buy in to something new? Will you stay with what you bought into?