Certified Copy

Well, this took an unexpected turn... Life Through Movies #5

I'm 14, laying on my bed, hands behind my head, looking into space. I've been like this for the past 2 hours, just thinking. My dad passes by, comes back, pops his head in and says "Basking into memories from yesterday?"

Indeed I was. I can't remember what I did the previous day, nothing really important, but my father's question perfectly encapsulates how much of an overthinker I was (and how another overthinker can perfectly spot his peers).

A few years later I understood that a looking-into-the-infinite style wouldn't get me very far in life. Execution was more important than mulling over ideas or memories. So I've lived the last 10 years pushing against my overthinker nature and just doing.
Except for the last 10-15 days of every year. There I give myself permission to just think, and I treasure it.

I buy 7-12 books on very different subjects, years of publication and styles and start reading them all at once. I read a paragraph from one, when I get bored I jump to the next book, read a couple of pages and randomly open another one. Repeating the cycle for hours until there's some family obligation to fulfill. I previously fed my brain with lots of questions, past year reviews exercises, ideas and thought experiments.

After a while, some novel connections start to pop up. Answers in unexpected ways.
Avenues dormant in my head start lighting up, new avenues are created. I start connecting dots. I lift my eyes from my Kindle and look into infinity. I jot down thoughts, insights. I continue reading. I do this every second I'm able to during these end-of-year days.

Closer to New Year's Eve, I start deciding on a few different objectives for next year, with very specific metrics and timelines. A sort of Plan of Action for next year.

This year I've decided to just drop this last part.

I realized I didn't accomplish any objective from last year. Like, way off. So why bother? And mostly, I realized the things I treasure the most that happened this year were unplanned, unexpected things.

For example, taking up jiu jitsu was nowhere in my plans this past year. Martial arts, sweaty pijama men making headlocks on me and coming home injured at least once a week seemed like the extreme opposite of how anyone would describe my interests.
I arrived through an unconventional route (Josh Waitzkin + Sam Harris), took a few test classes and now I'm addicted.

Life, like good books and movies, should surprise you.
So I'm just going to start optimizing for surprise.

I also wasn't expecting to retire this year. Three years ago, my wife and I explicitly agreed on a plan: let's save and invest everything we can, until our low-risk investments give us a completely passive income we can live off of, so we can focus on our passions, all while having fun in the process.

This last part is important, we wouldn't be frugal FIRE people for 5-10 years, we'd travel and eat out whenever we felt like, but we'd also not splurge in unnecessary things like expensive cars or pretentious restaurants. Around summer of this year, through a process of meta-delegation, good salaries and just letting go, my marketing agency became pretty much autonomous while giving us a decent income that pays for rent and all the basics of a good life.

I suddenly realized I had a lot of free time in my hands, and my first instinct was to start another business so we get to the amount we wanted invested faster and then start focusing on my passion, filmmaking. But in a moment of self-realization, fisherman story style, I realized, why not just make a movie now? So that's what I'm kind of doing right now.

I obviously only used the word "retire" in the previous paragraph to try to surprise you. And to try to look cool. But I realize it's a house of cards. The agency is not antifragile, next month it can just disappear. I’m far from retired.

And actually wrote all the previous text stream-of-consciousness style, having no idea where it would take me. Except for the story at the beginning, that I added afterwards because I felt the "hook" was not that interesting. So I thought the cute story would fit in. But now rereading it I'm not so sure it works. Another thing I'm struggling with is the ending.

It all stems from the fact that I had no idea what to write about this week.

I raised the topic with my wife on a plane on Friday, and she gave me a great idea to talk about this movie Festen that would beautifully tie in with uncomfortable end-of-year family dinners, but then we realized it was too dark to tie a movie about child abuse with Christmas. What if my 50 followers on Twitter get me canceled?

I then scrapped another one called Only God Forgives that is extremely violent and has nothing to do with God, or Christmas. What if it comes across as if I'm making fun of God? What would my catholic family think of me? Or Steven Foster?

Then this meta-idea came: let's do a riff on Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy, this great movie with Juliette Binoche that turns kind of meta mid-way through. I’ll do it showing, not telling. "You're so clever Oscar!", I congratulated myself going into it. It then became bigger and bigger and kind of pretentious so I decided to scrap it.

Instead I decided to just start vomiting this whole text to see what came out, which was this bullshit thing about "optimizing for surprise" when what I was meaning to say is that I have absolutely no clue what to do next year. But again, just trying to look cool, man. In control.

I then fell into an existential rabbit hole questioning everything. Especially this newsletter. Oh, man. It's like the 5th one you make and you're already running into trouble thinking about what to write on. You said you could do this forever. Look how far you got...

But I digress.

I'd always wanted to use that expression in english.
"But I digress."
There's probably not a time where I have digressed more, so it's only fair I use it here.

Anyway, now I'm just putting this out hoping people will not realize it's just lazy writing and will tell me it's great and perfect and clever so I can just publish as is and continue basking in my thinking.

---

Look out for:

• Please watch Certified Copy. It's really great.

• And also read I Think You're Fat

  • Kind of a homage to both

No, really. LOOK OUT FOR:

• The mirror scene in the kiosk, and in the whole movie how he uses literal reflections to convey an ambiguous point

• The Iranian director of the film Abbas Kiarostami, Palme D’Or winner, would usually only work with amateur actors, film in Iran, and with no budget. This is a notable exception. 

• Juliette Binoche won Best Actress at Cannes for this role.

For anyone interested, after perusing my antilibrary To Read list, this was the shortlist for the year (some with notes I saved, and then an * next to the ones I ended up buying):

• *East of Eden - John Steinbeck (it’s been on my list for awhile, and Silvio Castelleti convinced me to finally read it)

• *The Overstory - Richard Powers

• Something by Yasunari Kawabata (Palm-of-the-Hand Stories*, Thousand Cranes, Snow Country)

• *The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century - Alex Ross (recommended by Johnny Greenwood)

• The Tibetan Book of the Dead

• Projections: A Story of Human Emotions - Karl Deisseroth

• Something by Luis Sepúlveda

• The Laws of Human Nature - Robert Greene

• *This Is How You Lose the Time War (This fast fiction read has won just about everything: the Nebula Award for Best Novella of 2019, the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novella, and more. DO NOT look at the Amazon description, any reviews, or any overviews of the plot. Just buy it and dive in. The less you know beforehand, the better, and its 150–190 pages will fly by. Try the first 20–30 pages, and you’ll see what I mean.)

• Death - Thomas Clark https://www.naturalism.org/philosophy/death/death-nothingness-and-subjectivity 

• *The Network State - Balaji Srinivasan

• The Puzzler - A.J. Jacobs (the author of I Think You’re Fat)

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - David Foster Wallace

• In the Sargasso Sea - Thomas Allibone Janvier

• *Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World - John O'Donohue

• The Garden of the Finzi-Continis - Giorgio Bassani

• *Arctic Dreams - Barry Lopez

• Deep Work or Digital Minimalism - Cal Newport

• *The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life - Boyd Varty

• Something by Joan Didion

• *Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us - Russ Roberts

• Visions of Japan: Kawase Hasui's Masterpieces

• Something by Ivan Illich

• 88 The Narrow Road - Felix Dennis. (My favorite book by 500M net worth author Felix Dennis. Everybody talks about his main book (How to Get Rich), but I think his follow up “The Narrow Road” is better)

• *’Spaceships over Glasgow: Mogwai and Misspent Youth' - I love Mogwai

• The Courage to Be Disliked: The Japanese Phenomenon That Shows You How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness

• *The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering - Byung-Chul Han 

• All The Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr

• *Triste Tropiques - Claude Lévi-Strauss (Nassim Taleb mentioned it)

• The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea - Yukio Mishima

• *The Twilight World - Werner Herzog

• *Show Your Work! - Austin Kleon

And this are some of the exercises, questions and ideas I’ve been feeding my brain with:

• Going down this AI music rabbit hole that Yehudis Milchtein suggested

• I always use Tim Ferriss’ 17 questions + quite a few other specific questions for me

• 5/25 Warren Buffet’s rule

• Sahil Bloom’s questions