What You'll Learn Trying Extreme Experiments
A few things I've picked up from "spectrum hopping"
Good Morning from Las Vegas, Nevada
I safely finished my cross-country road trip with my dad 🚘 .
The last two emails covered my thoughts on meaningful work and meaningful leisure. You can read those here and here.
This email shares lessons learned from my experiments testing various extremes.
I express some strong opinions this week, so I encourage you to surface any points of disagreement or start a productive debate 😃
Enjoy!
Extreme Lifestyle Experimentation
My most consistent hobby in college was concocting strange and extreme lifestyle experiments. At every twist and turn, I was always testing some quirky new way of life.
These are some of the things I tinkered with:
Strict veganism (1+ year), strict carnivore (50+ days and counting)
Drinking 11 cups of milk everyday (60+ days, gained 25 lbs)
Reading 50+ books in a year, watching ZERO Netflix shows (4+ years)
Completely QUITTING mainstream media (4+ years)
Being dead sober (13 months)
Deleting every social media accounts (1 year)
Sleeping with my mouth taped shut to force nasal breathing
Spending 2 minutes in a freezing pool every day (40 days)
Moving solo to Asia for 3 months
These ‘radical’ lifestyles make no sense for many people, but this is my idea of fun.
Despite my roommates, parents, and friends constantly questioning these decisions asking “can’t you just be normal for once?” I always find myself drawn to one experiment or another. I just want to see what would happen.
These are the four main things I learned from years of constant experimentation.
Some learnings
1) Identity Shifts—Way Less Painful Than I Had Feared
The scariest part of going from being an extreme vegan to eating meat was social fear. Ego death. It was a massive identity shift.
What would my vegan friends think? What would my other friends and family say?
Surprise, surprise. This fear was unfounded. Most people gave didn’t care—literally at all. My friends that ate meat were happy I was no longer complicating every outing. My vegan friends got over it extremely quickly.
As is usually the case, I suffered more in my imagination than in reality.
I had been ready for months to switch back to eating meat, but my identity was so closely connected to being vegan that I was intimidated by the change.
Ultimately, I just had to bite the bullet. After 6 years of vegetarianism, I went to Panda Express and crushed some teriyaki chicken. The floodgates haven’t closed since.
Now, realizing most people don’t notice or care, I “spectrum hop” fairly effortlessly.
2) New Perspectives—Only Visible By Embracing Opposites
We all think we realize how bad digital addiction is. We “know” that everyone is tethered to their phones. In my opinion, you don’t truly see the “zombie reality” until you go all-in on the Luddite-Amish-Henry-Thoreau-Walden opposite.
I spent 2018 as a modern monk: I had zero social media accounts.
I didn’t even bring a phone to campus.
It was only then, forced to do nothing but socialize, read, or people watch, that I truly saw our dystopian digital society in full form. 90% of people walked around campus completely unaware of an external reality. Headphones in their ears. Phones in their faces. Utter ignorance of their surroundings.
Wall-E looked like reality. Pre-phone films felt like science fiction.
You don’t notice until you completely switch sides.
From playing at the extremes, I learned that objective clarity and perspective are most visible when you are fully removed from the target behavior.
Similarly, it was only when I finally stopped being vegan that I became hypersensitive to how annoying I was. This is me formally apologizing for being a pain in the ass all those years. Whoever put up with me, thanks, but next time just put me in my place.
(**disclaimer: some people may feel differently and might not wish to be put in their place)
3) You Are Missing Nothing
For about 4 years, I haven’t watched a single Netflix series or voluntarily consumed any MSM (mainstream media). I don’t watch award shows (who is Oscar?) I don’t care about the NBA, NFL, or MLB. I’ve learned zero TikTok dances, and my Snapscore is 0.
I leave all that trivia nonsense for Jeopardy.
If you genuinely derive value from some of these activities, please continue them. My point is NOT to enforce my lifestyle on other people, you included.
I just want you to know that you don’t need to keep up with pop culture. Nothing bad will happen if you forget it exists.
Whatever is truly important to know about, you’ll know about. (ie global pandemics).
I’ve never seen a single episode of The Office, and I have no desire to.
I’m dying far too soon to spend any more life rations on mind-numbing consumption.
My opinion? Unless you love sports and movies, life is too short to give a shit about most athletes and celebrities.
Three pieces of cliche life advice for this week?
Focus only on what you can control.
Be the hero of your own story.
Choose active leisure over passive consumption.
4) Learn To Stop Buying Your Own Limiting Beliefs
Most people agree with one of the following.
I’m not a runner
I’m not flexible
I can't lose/gain weight
I have a low tolerance for excuses. Just about every goal can be accomplished with a simple system executed consistently for a looong period of time.
I’m a believer in human potential. Don’t list the reasons you can't. Most things are doable. Think why you can.
Some people are certainly predisposed to be better at certain sports, but just about everyone can achieve basic competency in any domain.
You aren’t a runner because you’ve never put effort into being one. Not because you can’t. Try running 3 times a week for an entire year. You’ll get better.
Unless you’ve tracked a definitive caloric surplus every day for 30+ days, I don’t want to hear that you “can’t gain weight.”
Some people have credible excuses and legitimate setbacks. Fair, but I think you’ll be more fulfilled by finding ways to overcome roadblocks instead of living in comfortable stasis.
The Downside—Be Warned
Avoiding Conversation Domination ⚠️
Besides the fact that I was always tired and never put on muscle, the real reason I stopped being vegan was that I could never escape the conversation.
The worst memory of this was in Tzfat, Israel 🇮🇱
A well-meaning cadre of drugged-out orthodox jews trapped me at their Shabbat dinner for three hours. Instead of learning about their life, Judaism, or literally anything else, I got stuck in the same-old-same-old “why are you vegan” chat for the entire evening.
Next time I go to the spiritual capital of the Jewish world, I’m eating the damn Brisket.
This is why I’m also hesitant to tell people that I’m from Las Vegas or that I was an Alabama student. Immediately, the conversation becomes repetitive and boring (for me). It’s the same questions.
Do you gamble a lot?
Do you live in a casino?
Do you go to the football games?
When I need an ice-breaker, being from Vegas is incredibly convenient. But most of the time, this small talk is death by repetition, and I can do it on autopilot. I’d rather talk about colonizing space, Elon Musk, books, or something new and interesting.
Clearly, this downside hasn’t dissuaded me from trying new extremes, but it’s something to be aware of before embarking on strange experiments.
That’s all for this week
As always, I’d love to hear from you.
What have you been up to? What have you been learning?
You can reply directly to this email 😃
Have an awesome week,
Louis
Hyperlinks To Various Things
Podcast Updates 🎧
LK #66 with Akaash Pardesi: Mastering Reality with Mental Frameworks
LK #65 with AJ Osborne: Thought processes for buying $150M in self-storage.
LK #64 with Mona El Isa from Enzyme.Finance: DeFi hedge funds.
LK Content Coming Soon 📅
Steph Smith from Trends (newsletter from The Hustle)
Serial entrepreneur and former Miss Nevada USA Lisa Song Sutton
Quick Clicks ✈️ Travel Themed
(1) 📚 Fun Educational Resource 📚 : Better Explained
One of the best blogs on the internet. If you have even a slight curiosity in math, this website will blow your mind.
(2) 🖊 Other Educational Resource 🖊 : 50 Days of Writing Tips
For 50 days, viral Twitter author David Perell sends you advice for becoming a better writer.
Photo of the week - Holy ETH
After two bullish Ethereum focused podcast interviews (Mona El Isa and DeFi Andy), I’ve been paying a lot more attention to Ethereum.
April 2021 was an insane month for the currency… nearly doubling for the second time this year 🤯
I have no clue what this summer is going to look like for the crypto universe, but this recent spike shows us that the wild west is still very wild.
As always, do your own research. Make your own decisions.