Full-contact living
a combat philosophy for living well
🏛️ I have a small book’s worth of notes on the idea of Full-Contact Living—a combat philosophy for living well. Instead of pushing words around in private, I’m starting to write it out. I both love and hate this. Love, because it lights me up; hate, because I want to create a more polished series of essays. That will come later.
🥊 The attitude of Full-Contact Living helped me feel more alive, awake and at home in this world than I thought possible. Modern culture leaves us hungry, and so we seek nourishment elsewhere. Navigating the depths is not easy, but we need more people fluent in this weirdness.
🤷♂️ But who am I to be talking about this, and what experiences brought me here?
📝 If you call yourself a writer but you’re not publishing, you’re just journaling. Ouch.
✋ When things feel chaotic, it’s easy to let it fill your entire view. Instead of fighting the movement, release the fixation: I can’t stop staring at my hand.
😁 I had a wonderful day that unexpectedly began at 4am. I reflected on how it might be less-than-wonderful for others: Own your brand of happiness, no matter how weird it looks to others.
👨🏼💻 I forced myself to ship an early beta of my new coaching brand @ TheTechCoach.io. Some of the forms aren’t even hooked up yet. I was loathing the idea of figuring out CSS layouts, so I partnered with ChatGPT, sending a photo of a website I liked and asking it to replicate the layout (not design). Then it added each section as I described it. It still needed plenty of tweaks, but I was impressed at how robust it was. Anything that saves me fiddling with HTML/CSS is a plus.
📄 My read of the week: The Who Cares era. Human stories and acts of attention become even more precious in a world that defaults to disinterest.
📹 Despite being a big fan of personality typing, I’d neglected to learn my Enneagram type. Recently, the Gram kept popping up in random places, so I randomly asked ChatGPT what it thought my type was. It guessed 5, and the description was eerily accurate. I confirmed it with some longer tests, and then I found this video, which felt equal parts life-changing recognition and sustained personal attack.
—Dan
