Howdy folks! Welcome back after a brief hiatus. Much has happened with me. My family recently moved to San Diego, California from Portland, Oregon. Driving a thousand miles with an infant was about as much fun as you’d think.

2022 has been a year of big changes for me. I have a baby. I turned 50 somehow. I’m in the midst of radically changing my career. And now I’ve moved to Southern California.

Almost everything in my life has suddenly changed. I didn’t intend for all of this to happen at the same time, it’s just a coincidence. But it’s also an opportunity.

I recently read Katy Milkman’s book How to Change and an early point she makes is that change tends to stick better when we feel we have a clean slate. After a reset, we’re better able to build new habits. 2022 for me is THE EVEN GREATER RESET. (If you don’t get this joke, I’ll explain it at the end.)

I’m now well into the second half of my life and I feel I’ve completed many of the journeys that drove the younger me. It’s time to close these chapters and open some new ones. This will be a recurring theme in this newsletter, but right now I’d just like to talk about my life with media.

I’ve consumed insane amounts of media, it’s made me who I am, I have no regrets. But I’m now at the diminishing returns phase. I'm no longer getting nearly so much back from the time I'm putting in. It's time to scale back media's role in my life. I'm mostly done with movies, TV shows, social media, and online videos. Of course, I’ll still be doing some amount of all this, but it'll be way less. Matter of fact, I’ve already chopped down my intake by about 70%. The change is made, it just needs to hold.

The one form of media I’m excluding is books. I can read as much as I want because I feel the net result from that activity is positive in my life. I just replaced my dying 2017 Kindle and this has made reeding just a bit more fun and friction-free. Those of you in the US can still get an excellent deal on the Paperwhite at Amazon. It’s awesome and highly recommended.)

I’ve been reading The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. This is the first of his books I've read. Robinson is one of the new fiction authors I’m aware of who tells systemic stories. A great line from the book: "No conspiracy theories, please, so fucking tedious those people— as if things secretly made sense!"

I’ve also made a small but substantial change to how I read: I keep reading the same book until I’m done – either the book is finished or I’ve read all I intend to. Prior to this I tended to have several books on the go at once. This is not as bad as flipping about between open tabs or apps, but it’s a similar unfocused activity and I want to phase it out.

Here's my parting thought to you, dear reader. I'm sure you want to make some changes. Have you had a reset? If not, where can you find one? Even if your life doesn’t seem to be that different, I’m sure it is. Maybe you had a break up. Maybe your kids aren’t kids anymore. Maybe you just turned whatever age. And if you really can’t think of anything, the pandemic is hopefully over so just use that. Find a reset and create change from there.

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THE LATEST FROM ME

I’m currently working on Remix Part 3, several freelance projects and releasing my 2020 doc This is Not a Conspiracy Theory for free on YouTube. We’re now up to Episode 5, one of my favorites in the series. The final episode will be posted in a couple weeks.

Here’s a recent podcast interview with me by my friend Aryeh Cohen-Wade.​

(And for those who don’t know, The Even Greater Reset is a reference to The Great Reset, a World Economic Forum idea that has caught the ire of the conspiracy crazies. As usual, these concerns seems overwhelmingly stupid.)

Talk to you all in a couple weeks or so! Happy summer to everybody in the northern hemisphere!
Kirby

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