Happiness

What if you could actually do whatever it was that made you happy?

I don't mean the freedom to go out to dinner whenever you wanted, purchase whatever your heart wanted to purchase, or snub a person just because you don't feel like talking. I'm talking bigger, purpose level stuff. What if you could actually enjoy life, day in and day out, doing exactly what you always wanted to do, feeling fulfilled in your work or daily life, finding that your joy was overflowing with each passing moment?

That sounds like a fairytale, and in some ways, it is. The fact is that even if you actually got what you wanted, and you could do, day in and day out, whatever it was that you most loved to do, hard moments were going to come and there would be seasons of sorrow. I was reminded this past week that Solomon himself said this in his letter of Ecclesiastes, after having lived a storied and privileged life if there ever was one, that in spite of having the ability to do and attain whatever he desired, he found that at the end of the day it was all meaningless.

There is a Christian thought that says that the chief end of man is the enjoyment of God; that is, once we have come to taste the pleasure of our salvation that is found in Jesus, we will increasingly grow in our delight of him so that, in the end, our greatest pleasure is giving honor and praise and glory to God, through whom we have received this great joy. I would never argue this theologically; in fact, quite the contrary. It is one of the principled themes that guides my life. We must find great joy in God himself, through Jesus Christ, or our faith is worthless. Why would I want to put my confidence in something that robbed me of pleasure? This is contrary to my entire being; I know, without having to learn it, without having to be taught it, without anyone having to tell me, that in my innermost being I will pursue whatever is most pleasurable to me. When I choose to pursue something otherwise, it feels profoundly off, like choosing the wrong path at a fork in the woods.

We are so guided by pleasure, in fact, that there are times when we are not even aware that we are doing it. There are times where the initial decision doesn't appear to be for our own pleasure at all, but the outcome is far more desirable. In other words, we choose the difficult path now because the long term reward is far better. There is something about us that knows the decision will end in pleasure even if, in the moment, our senses tell us otherwise.

I have sat on the exit row on an airplane on more than one occasion and every time I have listened to the flight attendant tell me that, should I choose to sit there, I would be responsible for ensuring that the other passengers made it safely out the door and down the slide, in the event that an evacuation was even possible (something I always assume will probably not be the case). I believed that the appeal the attendant was making was to my reason, and indeed, that is true to a certain degree. We human beings have the ability to choose against our natural instinct to save ourselves, and instead hang back in a dangerous position in order to let other people go on ahead to safety. That is a uniquely human characteristic, that we can choose reason over instinct. Yet, there is another factor at play as well, and this is the appeal to our pleasure.

It is our natural instinct towards pleasure that I may say unites us with the creation itself. My dog might choose the safety of my own family over his own family, much the same as I might choose the safety of the other passengers over my own, but this has nothing to do with reason. My dog puts my family first because his instinct is to serve; to say it another way, it is his pleasure to do it.

You might wonder how it is possible that there is any pleasure at all from putting ourselves in danger, or how remaining in danger is more pleasurable than running on to safety, but consider the outcome in either case. If we decided to disregard our responsibility and jump out of the exit door before anyone else had a chance, we would probably survive, along with at least a few others. Indeed, it is entirely possible that everyone would survive, and our act of cowardice would be inconsequential to the outcome. But we would have to live with it; we would have to live with the knowledge that we bailed out in what may have been the greatest moment of responsibility to others we have ever faced. It would have been a great displeasure to us to have to live under that shadow; we would be safe, but we would also be ashamed.

On the other hand, had we taken our responsibility seriously we may end up dead. Perhaps we would survive, in which case we would be lauded a hero. But if we did die, at least we would have had the pleasure of knowing that we went out helping others; we would still be lauded a hero, we would just not have the knowledge of it. Nevertheless, most would say, better to die as a noble person than to live as a coward.

The point of the story is simply that, even if we didn't immediately recognize it at the moment of decision, the end result was that our pleasure would be increased. It brought us more pleasure to set aside our inherent self-interest in order that others would be led to safety. We may not have known it when we sat in the exit row (a decision largely made for our own pleasure and increased leg room) and we may not have immediately known it when our exit services were actually required, but when it was all over and as many as could be saved were off the plane, we would have remarked that it was "our pleasure" to assist however we could.

So our pleasure is our chief motivation; God is our chief end. This truth has led many people to learn contentment and joy despite their circumstances. Many Christians, despite tremendous difficulty and suffering, can nevertheless say that they have joy because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ. It was worth whatever they had lost! It was like a treasure in a field that they sold everything to get. Yet I would argue that despite the theological truth, and the experiential reality of having enjoyed Christ in spite of suffering (and having seen Him enjoyed by others), the dimension of our pleasure that we have too quickly set asunder in our modern era is the reality of our humanity.

I have come across many people, and I may include myself in this, who have found themselves in unpleasant circumstances, but rather than change the circumstances for their pleasure have instead attempted to will themselves towards joy in Christ. I wonder how often Jesus might have curiously suggested that they simply change whatever it was that they did not like.

Indeed, there are moments where we cannot change what brings us displeasure, humanly speaking. We cannot simply will away cancer or decide not to have it. In those moments, we will be glad to know that we find our great joy in Christ. But what of the person who is miserable because they do not live near their family, or the person who is miserable in their job, or the person who lives in a place where they have no friends, or attends the church that they do not enjoy? To what degree are we expected to find joy in Christ in circumstances where our joy might be renewed simply by changing something?

Perhaps we assume that making a decision based purely on whatever will make us happy is unspiritual. I would argue that this is precisely the case, and precisely the reason we should do it. In one sense, we know that all of life is spiritual; that is, there is nothing that is not in some way affected by our relational status with God the creator of the universe. But in another sense, we are flesh and blood; we are irrevocably "earthy" in our existence and unmistakably unspiritual, which is exactly how God intended it to be. If it is impossible for us to separate the spiritual from our decision making process, it is equally as impossible–and equally unwise–for us to separate our humanity from the decision making process. We may even find that it is our earthly situation that is robbing us of our spiritual joy in Christ!

I was asked the question once whether I felt like I would be disobeying Jesus if I did not plant a church. "What a spiritual question!", I thought. Of course, I had no answer to it, as I hadn't really considered whether or not Jesus' call to me was one that I could obey or disobey, or whether he would be pleased or displeased with my decision. To that point, I had simply considered that this is what I should do. I had weighed the alternatives. This seemed right. It seemed like something worth exploring. By the time this person had asked me whether or not I would be disobeying Jesus, I really didn't know. I supposed that I could be perfectly obedient to Jesus doing any number of things, but this was the one that, for now, seemed to be the right one. I don't even know what I answered when the person asked.

Standing where I am now and considering the question through the lens of hindsight I see the deep flaw in it. To me, it spiritualizes what is in many ways a very human question: what do you want to do, and why are you doing it? For as much as Jesus calls us to come and die to ourselves so that we can live for him, it is also a deep truth of the good news that Jesus meets us precisely where we are. I would suggest that the way we can know a call is from Jesus is if the outcome fills us with great pleasure.

In fact, I may go so far as to say that I am convinced that Jesus greatest call on us is to whatever it is that will bring us the most pleasure.

It is important to understand that that Jesus knows better than we do what will bring us pleasure. There are dark desires of my heart that may fool me into believing that they will bring me pleasure, and in the moment, they might, but in the long run, will lead to my destruction and actually rob me of joy. Whereas, a temporary denial of that quick pleasure will lead to lasting joy. Jesus desires my greater pleasure, the one that fills me with lasting joy, and not a temporary high.

Yet there are many things in life that bring great joy and are not sinful, or guilty pleasure, or pleasures that are fleeting, but are good, God-given pleasures that are flawed because we are flawed but are good because God in his mercy has made sure they remained good. If your family is anything like mine is is deeply flawed and yet it is good. I live in and with a community of people who are deeply flawed and yet profoundly good. I live in a town with deeply flawed leadership and yet, somehow, by God's grace, is still good. There are good things that abound around us and that bring me great happiness.

There was a moment in my life when I would have moved anywhere for God, and many times did. (I am thankful that God has not called me to international missions, and I am not sure how I would have responded if he had.) We moved to many different states and cities, and would have moved to many more, in order to pursue the calling that we felt he had placed on our lives. Why did we do that? It was our great pleasure! There was something about the continual call, the next step, the bigger ministry. We weren't bound by time, place, or relationships. We would go wherever God called!

But was that more or less spiritual than our current desire not to ever move again, desiring that we stay here for a very long time, even if it means ministering in relative obscurity for the rest of our lives? This, too, is our great pleasure. To remain in a place where our children are loved, where we are cared for, with people that we love, with people that we care for. You might ask, what if Jesus has called us to great influence? I would suggest that Jesus has not called us to influence; he has called us to joy.

And so I return to my humanity and my joy and pleasure and family and all the things that make me me and you you. What are we doing or not doing under the misguided belief that Jesus has called us to contentment despite our displeasure? Perhaps Jesus has called us away from our displeasure so that we will find our contentment. I have run into those who lived in displeasure because they felt they were called by God to do so; I can't help but wonder if they are missing his purest call. Maybe contentment means deciding to take a lower paying, less influential job simply because it is near family, and family makes us happy. Maybe it is to not take the next promotion because it would mean more time away from home, and home makes us happy. Maybe it would be to move to the shore, because the shore makes us happy. Maybe it would be to move to a small town by a lake in the woods, because nature makes us happy.

Jesus has called us to pleasure in Him. What I am suggesting here, for myself and for you, is that if we really found our deepest satisfaction in Jesus, we would find ourselves far more free to choose whatever makes us happy in this life. Do you want to find another job? Find another job. Jesus is okay with it. Do you want to move closer to family? Then move. Jesus is just as much there as he his here; you may find him to be more pleasurable when you are near those you love. Actually leaving behind all those things that Jesus calls us to leave behind so that we can pursue him means that we don't have to feel like we are bound by those things anymore; instead of feeling enslaved to a job or to a location or a place or whatever, we are actually freed from the bondage so that we can enjoy them. Jesus doesn't just bring us spiritual joy; he frees us to experience human joy as well; the type of joy that comes from sitting next to a brook or fishing on a quiet pond or hiking a mountain or turning off our cell phone and just sitting there, unreachable for the rest of the world, playing a game with our kids, reading a book, doing a puzzle.

Finding our joy in Jesus reveals a freeing truth: Jesus doesn't need us to save the world. He's already done it. Which means that you can go and enjoy Him, forever.

A Case of the Mondays (and Tuesdays...)

There are morning people, and there are night people. Morning people pop out of bed and are ready to go for the day. Night people stay up far too late, and never stop to consider what the next morning might be like. Most people are one or the other, and you know which one you are. I often wonder whether people start out their weeks the same way. Do some people start out the week ready to go, with Monday being the most productive day, and others end the week on a strong note?

I'm a morning person, and sometimes I start my week out strong, but other times, Monday is a day of mush-brain and staring at walls. The challenge is that when I start my week out strong on a Monday, I typically have a good week. When I don't, my Monday mood drifts into Tuesday, and then I have to take Tuesday morning and refocus, and by the time I do, it feels like the week is already gone. I have the same anxiety on a Saturday when it's 10 o'clock and I haven't done anything yet; I feel like I've wasted the whole day and I might as well give up. It might be a disorder.

I knew I wanted to write something to get my head going, however, and I couldn't figure out what, so I decided to pose a question to myself: what was the most profound thing that you've heard or thought over the last 24-48 hours? Unfortunately, my response to my own line of questioning was to stare off into space. Perhaps there was nothing profound that occurred. But then I considered that profound is relative. The most profound thing from the past 48 hours might not have been very profound at all, but nevertheless would still have been more profound than everything else.

So, in no particular order, some things that have occurred to me.

Laguardia Airport Sucks

My mom was in town and she flies into Laguardia when she comes because she can get super cheap plane tickets from Florida. Driving to Laguardia in late winter/early spring is like driving over an over-populated rocky Tundra, only to find that your destination has just been bombed. And being taxed along the way to boot. It costs somewhere in the 20-30 dollar range to get from my house to the airport, the roads are crowded and filled with potholes, and in all honesty, there was a significant portion of the airport that looked like it had just been bombed. Laguardia is the worst.

No one cares about education anymore

I was listening to the radio this morning and heard about a website where you can pledge money to college athletes that would incentivize them to stay in college rather than leaving college and entering the draft to go get paid. On the one hand, I think that college athletes on the Division One level are getting hosed. Those colleges are bringing in massive dollars because of their athletic programs and the students aren't getting any of it, despite the hours they are putting in. On the other hand, it used to be that the real value of getting a scholarship was the education. In other words, if you offered some value to the school (athletic ability) they gave you something of value in return (a degree). But more and more a college degree seems to be worthless and we all know it. The real education takes place a) on the job or b) post-graduate education. And all of that is essentially worthless as well if there is another way for me to make a living. If you were in college and I told you that I would give you a job right now where you would make 1 million dollars a year, would you leave college? Probably. What if the job paid 250,000/year? Or 100,000/year? The median household income in the US is around $50,000, with the average salary being around $26,000. The average college graduate ends up with something like $28,000 in student loan debt. You start putting numbers together and we have a real problem. Of course these are all random musings and I actually do think that a college degree matters, and it does, eventually, pay off in a higher salary and employment rate according to the statistics, but at the end of the day, what we really care about is making that bank and being entertained. Hence paying college athletes.

I can't afford an Apple Watch

Seriously. I watched the Keynote yesterday because I enjoy technology. The most exciting thing for me, however, was that I could now get another Apple TV for 70 bucks. I wanted to get another one anyway, and now I'll save 30 bucks. Sweet. But a watch for 400 bucks? No thanks. It looks neat and if someone gave it to me, or I got it for a birthday or something, I'd think it was pretty cool (I think). But I also think that it would be outdated in two years, because technology. And then I'd be angry because I have a 400 dollar watch that doesn't really do what I want it to do, and I'd feel like I needed to upgrade, but then I'd need to blow another 400 beans. And I'm talking about the lowest end model. Maybe I need to adjust my thinking (What's 400/24? $16...is the watch worth $16/month?) or maybe I just need to see it in action. I wish I didn't take my phone out as much as I did, and I sometimes wish I wore a watch, like when I'm sitting in a meeting and I don't want to obviously check the time. But 400 bucks. Man, that seems like a lot of money for a third thing I have to remember to charge every night (iPhone, iPad, Watch) and really seems to only give me incrementally more convenience than my phone already does. And oh yeah, did I mention that it's going to be obsolete in two years? 

Prayer is good even at 6 AM

But it makes you tired. We always meet for prayer at 6 AM on Tuesdays and I always hate getting out of bed and then I'm so glad that I came but it sure is tiring.

Shoes are too expensive

I need new shoes. My podiatrist tells me they are the helmets of the feet and we shouldn't cheap out on shoes but dang, they are too expensive as well. Plus there are too many options. I walked into Sketchers the other day (not recommended by my podiatrist, BTW. Not supportive enough on the sides so your foot slides left and right, negatively impacting your plantar.) and not only are the shoes expensive but there are like 7,000 options. So now I'm not only anxious about spending the money on the shoes, but I'm concerned that when I get home I'm going to wish I bought the other pair. That's why I've essentially bought the same shoe for ten years. Which leads me to my next point...

I'm seriously considering a uniform

Steve Jobs had the black turtle neck and the jeans. I heard Mark Zuckerberg had a similar deal, wearing essentially the same thing every day. The idea is that it's one less decision that you really have to think about. You don't have to worry about buying clothes, or matching them, or what you want to wear that day, or whatever. You just have clothes and you put them on. I seriously could care less if I looked the same every day, as long as I liked the combo and it was comfortable. Picking out clothes annoys me because it takes too much energy and clothes are also too expensive. So I'm trying to decide on a uniform. Not sure what it will be yet.

The end.

The Apple Watch

In my free time (by which I mean "when I'm using the facilities") I follow several apple blogs. I've been interested in technology ever since I started using the Apple IIe in the computer lab in my middle school. My family got our first desktop, an Apple Performa LC575, and for a while as a teenager it was housed in my room. I had a series of PC desktop and laptops over a period of years, but about eight years ago got my first Macbook Pro and I've been a fan of Apple ever since.

In any event, the big news out of Cupertino is the upcoming release of the Apple Watch, and whenever these big releases come up it ends up occupying a decent amount of brain-space and I find myself theorizing over certain matters that I may or not see being discussed. For example, that the high-end Apple Watch, the "Edition" model, is going to cost $10,000+. That's definitely out of my price range. But then, so is the Sport model at $349. In fact, when the Apple Watch was announced around six months ago, my thought was, "eh". It looked cool, but I didn't own a watch now, had basically made the assumption that I'd never wear a watch again, and even if I did buy a watch I wouldn't spend $349 dollars on it. The most expensive watch I owned was probably a $75.00 Fossil watch. I wasn't sure why I'd spend more than that on a watch.

Where I did see value was in the fitness tracking. I've had two UP bands. The first one was the first generation that was plagued with problems and ultimately recalled by Jawbone. A friend of mine had it, got it refunded, got to keep the band but since he didn't use it, gave it to me. I used it for a little while and enjoyed it immensely until it busted. When the UP24 came out and it had wireless bluetooth syncing, I was excited, and requested one for Christmas. At $150, it seemed a little pricey for what it was, but I got it and was even more pleased with it. Until it died less than three months later, and thanks to Jawbone's incredibly crappy customer support who just made me go around in circles for several months even though I new the daggum thing was busted, I ended up with a nice looking Jawbone UP24 in my sock drawer, aka the place where electronics go to die. I vowed that I wasn't going to get another fitness tracker until Apple released whatever it had up it's sleeve.

When the Apple Watch was announced, I viewed it primarily through that fitness tracking lens. I watched the Keynote and figured that the fitness tracking capabilities plus the added features were worth about $200 to me. That was the price point that would convince me that this was something I should go out and get. To be clear, my financial situation is such that it would not be a wise move on my part to go out and blow 200 beans. Five kids means 200 bucks is the equivalent of feeding them for a week. Until I get a week off of that racket, I'm not just going to go buy the watch. My point is that $200 is a price that I could at least convince/justify myself to go stand in line for. At least that was my initial thinking when it was first announced.

After considering it a bit more, however, I came to the conclusion that for the technology, $349 seems like a very reasonable price. If my UP24 was $150, and this Apple Watch not only did more of the same (meaning the fitness tracking), but additionally included advanced notification, an exceptional screen, on-board apps, communication tools, and much, much more, then surely $349 was a reasonable price. That still didn't mean I was going to buy it. It's a sweet piece of gear, but was I really going to use it? Again, the value to me was as a fitness tracker. That's something I don't have the ability to do right now. I can already take phone calls, send messages, send pictures, view pictures, and all that other neat stuff that was actually a bit silly and more inconvenient 95% of the time using a Watch. $349 for a fitness tracker still seemed steep.

As purely a fitness tracker, it also looks like it's going to fall short of some of the others on the market, primarily because right now the assumption is that battery life is going to be somewhat of a drag. There's nothing definitive on that right now, but the rumor floating is maybe a full day charge. One of the reasons I enjoyed my UP24 was because of the sleep tracking, which is essentially nullified on the Watch if you have to take it off and plug it in all night if you want to use it the next day.

This led me to a few thoughts which I figured I'd share here. I really have no idea whether the Apple Watch is a great idea or a terrible idea, whether it's something Apple hopes will be game/life-changing for the consumer market or something they just think they can make a reasonable amount of profit in and figure, why not? And by the way, I do think it's one of those two reasons, if not both. As far as I can tell these are essentially the two questions Apple asks: can we make it better, and can we make money doing it? Or, "is it better for the consumer?" and "are there profits here?" In cases where they excel, the answer to both of those questions is clearly yes (in their mind–you may disagree with whether or not their products are better.) With a new product, my guess is that they think the answer to the first one is "yes" and the answer to the second will be "yes" as a result. Will it be a game-changer like the iPhone or iPad? I don't think anyone is willing to give a definitive answer, unless they work at Apple and they have to say that for marketing reasons, or because they've used it and genuinely believe it will be a game-changer. Whether it's a hit or not, I'm sure Apple is poised to make significant profit, because that's how they operate.

In any case, whether it will be a game-changing hit or not, here are a few thoughts in no particular order.

The Tech in the Watch Costs $349

Basically, I think that at the base end, the Sport model, what you are paying for is the tech. I think that $349 is the cost of the technology in the watch, whether you are getting the Sport, the Watch, or the Edition.

For those people who are like me, who really don't care about watches, but do care about fitness trackers, this is the reason that Apple is selling the "Sport" edition. It's a fitness tracker that's going to cost you $349. They have done their research, crunched the numbers, and decided that this is a reasonable price that people might pay for a premium tracker, and that's basically all that they are paying for. The "case" and the "band" (more on that later) are essentially just required components necessary for holding the fitness tracker in place. Granted, the Apple Watch is much more than a fitness tracker, but it's not less. $349 is the "no-less-than" price. In other words, Apple can't sell the technology in this watch for less than $349 and still make a comfortable profit. So if the tech is all you want, that's what you are going to pay.

But that leads to the second point about the whole Apple Watch branding and strategy.

The Watch is more of a Fashion Accessory than a Tech Gadget

Or, perhaps a better way to say it is that Apple is selling their technology wrapped in a fashion accessory. In other words, what you are buying is the fashion accessory. That is where the money is at. Will Apple make money on the technology? Of course. Whatever the profit is on the $349 technology will be the same across the board. Profits will increase, however, as the costs of the particular model goes up, because what you are really buying is not the technology, you are buying the fashion. In this case, the fashion consists of two elements: the case and the band.

Here's the thing. Historically, If you buy a watch, you keep the watch. If Apple is entering into the fashion arena, which clearly they are, I think there has to be something that you keep. I don't think that the assumption here is that the paradigm for fashion is suddenly going to change, and watches will suddenly become something you turn in and replace every two years. In the case of the Apple Watch, the thing that you will keep is not the technology–technology will get old and will need to be replaced in order to have the latest and greatest functionality–but you will keep the fashion, or the case and the band.

Here is how this plays out in real life:

Sport model? Replace it. All you bought was the tech wrapped in some rubber. You really didn't buy into the fashion aspect of it. What you wanted was the tech, and Apple made it possible for you to get into the game, knowing full well that the technology will be essentially obsolete in two-three years. When that time comes, you can upgrade with the same mentality you upgrade all your other tech. You knew it was depreciating the moment you bought it. This is the "watch equivalent" of the digital watch you bought at CVS when you were 12. Lifespan? About two years.

Apple Watch? Keep the band, replace the tech. I still have two $75 Fossil watches, one I bought for myself and one that someone gave me. I could replace the battery and they'd work as good as the day that I bought them. It's not like that cheap drug-store watch, but it's also not a family heirloom. It's a decent watch that ought to last me for a significant period of time and isn't something you just throw away. Of course, I'm pretty cheap and I'm not a watch guy, so maybe most people wouldn't keep a $75 watch. I'm told that even casual watch guys, however, will typically buy a watch that costs several hundred dollars. This is the target market for the Apple Watch.  

I'm seeing that the Apple Watch will sell for a minimum of $749. If that's true, that means that the case and the band cost $400. In other words, you've essentially bought yourself a $400 watch. That's why I think that unless the watch buying paradigm where you keep something of the watch dramatically changes (and I don't think it will), there has to be something that you keep on the Apple Watch, and in this case, I think what you are keeping is the case and the band. It cost you $400. It's not depreciable. In fact, good fashion in this category seems to me to be appreciable, meaning that it increases in value over time. Maybe that's not entirely the case for even a $400 watch, but I still think that at very least, a $400 watch is something you intend on keeping for a significant period of time, and certainly longer than the two-three year window at which point the technology within the watch becomes obsolete.

And then, of course, the Edition, where this is an especially poignant point. The suggested starting point I'm seeing is a minimum of $5,000, with a realistic starting point of somewhere north of $10,000. Now, I've seen it said that people who can afford a $10,000 dollar watch can also afford it every few years if they really want it. Maybe that's true. I just can't imagine (and again, I am not in the fashion industry, but from what I've read) that if you buy a $10,000 watch, you expect it to be worth anything less than $10,000 five, ten, or twenty years from now. Anything in this price range is in the family heirloom category. If you are spending that much on a watch, I have to believe that not only is the craftsmanship so superior to other watches that it is worth the premium, but also that when you buy it, you fully expect that it will hold it's value over time and you will expect that you can pass it on to a loved one at some point in the future. Applied to the Apple Watch, this means that the 10,000 dollar watch that you bought on day one will still be worth 10,000 dollars five years from now, and probably much longer.

The technology, however, won't. It will be obsolete in three years and worthless in five. This is the major difference between the Apple Watch and some other luxury watch. Everything about the luxury watch should hold it's value down the line. The internals and the externals. Not so in the Apple Watch. In the case of the Apple Watch, only the case and the band will hold their value. 

Which leads me to the third point...

The tech will be replaceable in the Apple Watch.

I haven't seen this officially written down as a prediction, but it's what I'm thinking right now and I figured I'd throw it out there just to see if it sticks. Given everything I've read about how this is really a Fashion accessory, what I've learned about the watch industry as a result, and what my common sense tells me, I think this is the plan.

My premise is that what you really bought when you bought the Apple Watch was a $349 computer wrapped in a Rubber Band, a $400 Watch, or a $10,000 Watch. If all you want is the tech, it's going to cost you $349 and you can expect to replace it every two-three years with a similarly priced computer.

If, on the other hand, you want a piece of fashionable jewelry for your wrist-computer, that's going to cost you extra, but the good news is that Apple has studied the fashion industry and what they are making is on par or better than whatever else is out there. Were you thinking of getting a 10,000 watch? Why not buy the Apple Watch, which does far more than those watches, but carries the same prestige and luxury? Even better, it will always be up to date.

I think this is why on every image of the Apple Watch, the different levels are called "cases". My iPhone is simply an iPhone. The case is something I buy after the fact that I put around my iPhone. Now, maybe in the watch world a "case" is the word that's used for the entirety of the timepiece, excluding the band. To me, though, it makes me think, again, that you are buying a $349 computer, but to carry it, you can buy a variety of different cases ranging from the low-end Sport Watch all the way up to the Solid-Gold Edition.

Once again, two (or three) things you can select with the watch.

Tech: Two sizes, $349

Case & Band: Three levels, with corresponding bands, $0, $400+, $10,000+

The tech will need to be replaced every two to three years. The Case & Band are what you are really investing in, if you want to do that.

Will it be life-changing? Who knows. 

Will Apple make money? Of course they will, otherwise they wouldn't have gotten into the category. Worst case scenario, they make whatever profit they can make off the mini-computer. Best case, they make the money from the mini-computer and a King's ransom off of the fashion, which typically carries a significant mark-up.

Of course, at the end of the day, I'm not a watch guy, and if I end up with an Apple Watch, it's going to be the Sport. Which is a big "if". I'll have to wait and see what next weeks Keynote brings.

Overbooked & Self-Editing

One of the problems with posting in an open forum is that I have to balance and self-edit some of what I want to say. The issue isn't that what I might say would offend anyone or be somehow crude or inappropriate, but is typically because it might relate to a semi-private situation or that it might relate to something I'm currently involved in, and as a result, could cause confusion or offense.

Case in point: My schedule is severely overbooked. I could explain which things on my schedule probably need to go, but then those organizations or groups that I'm involved with could read that a certain way and take offense, or be hurt, or whatever. I don't want that. Obviously, I think that everything I'm involved in is valuable and important. But sometimes, the perfect storm hits, and this is one of those weeks. When that happens it almost always causes me to take a closer look at what I'm involved with, and begin to decide which things have to go.

This coming weekend, I'm leading a youth retreat for a group of churches that asked me to speak. I've been looking forward to it for a while. I haven't done any youth-type stuff in a while, and the retreat is at one of my favorite locations in upstate New York. My entire family gets to with me, to boot, so we'll have a good weekend away (in February, in upstate New York...that will either sound delightful to you, or absolutely terrible.)

Unfortunately, I also have three basketball games this week (each with a JV and Varsity game), two church meetings, and a board meeting for the non-profit that I'm a part of. I'm overbooked.

The problem, of course, is that the things that really are a priority–my family, my own health physically, spiritually, and mentally, and my job-all take a backseat to just getting things done. Everyone has a limit to the things that they can achieve or reasonably accomplish. I'm certainly doing more than my limit.

Then there are other implications to being overbooked. One is that you have no flex time for other people. I forget where I heard the term flex-time in relation to this concept, (or maybe I made it up!), but essentially it's the idea that you would schedule in unscheduled time in your calendar. So each week, you'd schedule in time where you knew that you had nothing scheduled. This is different than "free time". It's different than "scheduled time". It's "flex-time". It's time that you scheduled in to use, if necessary, that doesn't make you overly-booked or overly-free. In essence, it's a schedule buffer. If things get tight, you aren't stealing from your family or your free time, you are borrowing "flex-time". 

If there is no flex-time, then inevitably something is going to give in one of the important areas that you typically don't schedule. In my case, a temporary addition of coaching basketball means I give up a lot of family time; if church gets busy, that eats up any additional time I might have had; if there are pastoral concerns that arise, it eats up free time; next thing you know, my own health and my family health have been squeezed out, and things are in bad shape.

In pre-marital counseling, we ask couples to consider what they want to do in the future before making choices today. You can't always predict what those things will be, but when you can, you can make wiser choices now to make sure that the important things aren't squeezed out in the future. For example, if you want to have one parent stay home with the children, then don't buy a house before having kids that requires two salaries to support. The choice you make today squeezes out the choice you want to make tomorrow, before you have even made it.

Such is the case with scheduling. If you want to have time for people, and your own health, and your family, and to do the things you really love, don't overbook yourself. You don't have to feel bad about saying no to something; you do have to count the cost of it before you say yes.

Perhaps I should have taken my own advice.

Sunday

It's Sunday afternoon and I just got the call that the service I was supposed to preach at tonight was cancelled. "Serendipitous", my wife said. It's been a long week, I'm tired, and my throat hurts.

I'm sitting in my big chair, by the fire, listening to the rain or sleet or whatever precipitation is coming down hit the roof of the house now, and I'm grateful for some down time.

Sunday afternoons in our house are tough. I often try to compare them to the "normal persons" weekend, but I really don't know what the normal person's weekend is like. We've never really had a normal weekend. Since we've had kids, we've been in church ministry and so our Sundays have always been busy. They are less busy now than they were when we were at churches that had multiple Sunday services, but they are still busy.

The real challenge is making sure that the kids get a chance to relax and don't feel like the house is in disarray. They go to school five days a week, Saturdays we try to keep pretty basic, but then Sunday rolls around and we're right back at it. Before you know it it's Sunday night, which is a school night...

In any case, it's nice to have a day where the obligations are finished and we can all just lock ourselves in the house and relax.

Also, tonight is The Walking Dead, so there's that.

Fatigued

Yesterday, my wife and I started an herbal cleanse. I think we're at that age where your body starts to deteriorate in a noticeable way and bouncing back to "healthy" form, however you define it, isn't as easy. We were both athletes and played on teams up through college, so maybe we're more mentally in tune with how our bodies feel, but when they just don't feel right, it's time to do something different.

My sister (and many friends) sell the products we're using. They're Advocare products and we are champions. We like the products, and full disclosure, that link on that sentence will make them money if you go buy some stuff from them, but that's somewhat irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make. For a while, my sister was touting "how much better we'd feel" if we took the products, or did a 10 day herbal cleanse, or whatever. She knew that I was out of shape and overweight. The problem, I told her, was that I didn't feel bad, so feeling better wasn't much of a motivation. I knew I didn't look that great compared to my former physique, but I didn't feel bad, so if I didn't care that much what I looked like (or how my clothes fit) the motivation to eat and live healthier because I'd feel better didn't really work.

So maybe it's my age that's made me just not feel that great recently. Maybe I finally got to the point where I started to notice that I wasn't being as healthy as I could be. For example, coffee never used to bother me other than waking me up when I was a little sleepy, but then more recently I noticed that after drinking it I would start to experience increased anxiety. Or lack of sleep never used to impact me in the middle of the day, but then I started to notice that I was having a tough time staying awake in the afternoons, especially when I was trying to study or do something else that required little physical activity or energy.

In any event, we've been doing this cleanse since yesterday, and everything I've said up to this point was actually intended to be just an introduction to say that I'm feeling fatigued, and I think I have the cleanse to thank for it. Just not in the way you might think.

Two things happen on the cleanse. Well, maybe more, but these are the two that are relevant to what I'm talking about. The first thing that happens is that you are supposed to cut out a bunch of stuff that's not very good for you while you are taking it. That includes but is not limited to coffee and alcohol. If you drink a lot of coffee or have even just a drink a night, this is going to make a huge difference in how your body feels. But it's also going to lead to the second occurrence: you are going to get more sleep.

When you stop drinking as much coffee, and you don't have that nightly glass or two of wine, you end up getting a much better night sleep. So the next day, you wake up, and your body doesn't need the same level of caffeine or it doesn't need the stimulants to keep itself going. Our bodies are fully capable of keeping ourselves moving, awake, and alert without chemical stimulants to do the job for them.

As a result, since you aren't battling the effects of caffeine or alcohol, and you are fully rested, you can actually focus on the other things in your life that are impacting how you are feeling. For example, many people deal with stress by eating or drinking. That masks the stress for a while, and you can at least endure it. The problem is, the stress hasn't actually gone away, you've just hidden it or masked it or put up some sort of facade. The stress is still there, though, eating away at you, and now even worse, since typically the eating and drinking binge doesn't consist of celery and water.

In my case, the fact that I'm off caffeine and fully rested has made me realize that I'm fatigued. Coffee masks it for a time. You start getting mentally exhausted, so you have a cup of coffee, then one leads to two and over time you are drinking way more than you think you are. At least, that's what happens to me. So now, I'm two days into a cleanse, and I feel good and I'm not drinking a bunch of coffee and I still feel tired but I'm not tired. Something else is causing the tiredness that I might not have known about unless I got on the cleanse.

That's why I say that I'm fatigued, and I have the cleanse to blame. The cleanse didn't cause it, it just revealed it.

All of that got me thinking about healthy outlets to relieve myself of fatigue or to reinvigorate myself to gain energy. Some people regain their energy by being with other people. Some people do it by being alone. Some people do it through hobbies. There are a lot of different ways to make sure that you are taking care of yourself.

For me, I think it might be writing.

I read something a popular pastor had said once about how he finds that his best moments of thought come not when he is studying or reading, but when he is expressing those thoughts in word. In other words, it was his habit of writing that actually reinvigorated him. I think I understand that. I also think I understand why it gets squeezed out: it takes time.

On the contrary, the things that cause me fatigue, or the things that rob me of mental energy, happen all the time. As an introverted person, dealing with people takes a lot of mental energy. And I actually like people! If I have to be relationally on, though, without a break, it robs the energy. Case in point, I coach basketball. Practices are fine. Game days are long. I'm at the gym for nearly four hours. At the end of it, I'm mentally exhausted.

So, here is the reason that something like writing would get squeezed out: writing requires mental energy, and when your reserve is depleted, you've got nothing left to get you started. If writing both replaces mental energy, but also requires it, you can end up in a conundrum where you don't have enough mental energy to get started, but if you don't do it, you won't be able to replace the mental energy that you've lost.

In that sense your mental energy is like the battery on your car. If it gets too depleted, you can't start the car. But unless you start the car, you can't recharge the battery, at least without some external assistance.

So after eating lunch and feeling mentally fatigued and exhausted, I decided I needed to do something that would be a good use of my time and would help me regain a handle on the day. Should I read a book? Should I work on an upcoming retreat?

No, I should write.

So I did.

Credit Card Fraud, Go Daddy's Bad Service, & The Internet

January was a pain in the butt month that was made worse recently by bad customer service from Go Daddy. Recently, things got a little better because of the Internet.

Let's start with the problem. On New Years Eve, my debit card was declined at a grocery store. No big deal, I thought. Must be a problem with the system, because it wasn't a no-funds issue. The grocery store couldn't give me a reason that the card was declined, but I paid a different way and went about my business. (It was New Years Eve! Who cares about credit cards! I'll deal with it next year!)

When I got back home the next day (we were visiting family when it happened) I tried to use my card again to no avail. Finally, I called the number on the card who directed me to fraud prevention and they informed me that unless I was trying to make a large purchase at a Toy's 'R Us in Toronto, (which I wasn't) my credit card number had been stolen. No big deal, head out to the local branch and they can whip me up a new card with a new number.

The worst part, of course, is that now you have to go and figure out the recurring monthly transactions that are hitting your card, and go and change all those services. My wife does the bills, and I have had the same card for years, so it was basically a waiting game to see when we'd get notifications that the payment didn't go through and we needed to adjust our billing information. Steadily they came in...Netflix, Hulu, my Gym membership, etc., and as they did, I changed the number and called it a day.

Some of these children aren't ours.

Fast forward three weeks, day off of school for the kids, we go to the Museum of Natural History, my wife gets a text message from the bank about my card: "did your card just get declined at a grocery store?" Nope, it hadn't. I call them immediately, and they inform me that once again, my credit card had been declined, this time in West Virginia. Here we go again, I thought.

Two notes as an aside: first, I do my banking with Chase and they were top notch in handling both of these situations. They caught the fraud right away and no money left my account at all. Excellent service. Second, I don't use my card that much so I looked at my purchase history to see if there was any place I was using the card where it might have been taken. Because it happened so close to one another, it clearly wasn't a case of it being hacked into through an electronic/computer based system, or it would have been a part of a huge data breach that hadn't been reported. It was most likely somewhere that I went relatively often and actually handed my card to the cashier, where they would walk away with it and could transmit the information somehow. The only transaction that matched: the gas station. Here in New Jersey, all the gas stations are full service. Our little town is a small one, so there is only one gas station I go, and I like the guys there. So while I'm not convinced (I have no evidence) that someone at the shop was taking my credit card numbers, it certainly looks suspicious.

In any event, now I had to go and change all those recurring payments again...arghh.

GO DADDY's BAD SERVICE

One of those recurring payments was to Go Daddy for web hosting for my wife blog. For about four or five years she's had a blog that she doesn't update very frequently but we maintain because there's always the dream. (See the previous posts about restarting & the Christian life...) When I set it up for her, I used Go Daddy to purchase the URL and to Host the blog because that's what I was familiar with. She was familiar with WordPress, so that's what we used. We set up an economy hosting package and basically that was it. We didn't have to think about it from then on.

Until, of course, my credit card got declined and they couldn't charge us the recurring monthly fee.

The first email I got alerted me to the problem. Unfortunately, it was right around when my credit card got stolen for the second time so I didn't have the new number yet to enter. At some point, I got a second email. On that email, it informed me that the next billing attempt would be on February 3rd, but that's all it said. Good, I have time to get my card and fix the billing, I thought. Even though the blog isn't updated much, I know my wife wants to keep the stuff that is on there. 

On February 2nd, I finally get my new card. February 3rd, I get the email that they attempted to bill me, and it didn't go through again. I immediately login to the Go Daddy website, and find that there is no where to renew my hosting. In fact, it's not even listed as one of the products that I purchased. I check the email again, and there's the small print: f an item is listed as cancelled, it can no longer be renewed. It has been deleted.

What?!?

So I call Go Daddy and tell them what happened. Now, I know that although that is their policy, it's extremely unlikely that they just automatically delete all the data the second that the third attempt at payment doesn't go through. It's been less than three weeks since the initial email alerting me to the problem. I get that they may turn off access, or something, but deleting is pretty severe and, if this was anything other than a personal home-cooked blog could cause serious problems. So I know the data is around somewhere.

The gentlemen on the phone confirms this, and he begins to tell me that there is good news, they can recover the data! But since I don't have a backup, it's going to be a full-recovery which costs $150. But the good news was that if I sign up for hosting again, I could get their introductory pricing! I suggested to him that given the extenuating circumstances, it seemed like maybe they could help me out a bit more. Nope, he said.

Well, I guess I'll take my business elsewhere.

The bummer was that there were a bunch of posts that I know that she didn't want to lose. The good news is that the internet exists.

THE INTERNET

I woke up this morning trying to figure out what to do about this situation, because I wasn't going to pay $150 dollars to recover however many posts were there. It occurred to me that Google kept a cache of many websites. Unfortunately, not thishappymess.com.

In process of searching that out, however, I came across the Internet Archive, which does have bots that go around and take snapshots of web pages, and lo and behold, they had taken a few snapshots of my wife's blog. It's not the same thing as totally recovering the content, but it did allow me to save a dozen or so posts. The key was that, on her main page, she had each entry in their full format, one after the other, with maybe 10-15 posts per page.

So that's the good news. I end on somewhat of a happy note. I got some of her stuff recovered. And Go Daddy stinks. Don't use them.

Best Advice & The Link

My last two posts have mentioned this article, so I went and tracked it down again. The downside of using multiple devices for web-related stuff is that sometimes, the stuff you read gets lost in transition. In any case, this is the link to the post I have been referencing.

The best advice on getting started in blogging:

Instead, this is what you do:

1. Sign up for a new blog.
2. Start writing.

That’s it. You do this as quickly as humanly possible.

http://john.do/today/

The Great Hurdle of Perfectionism

It's hard to blog when you are a perfectionist. If you have been afflicted with this God-awful disability, you know the problems associated with it. One of the challenges is the inability to get started on something if you know it's not going to be done right.

The advice on blogging (still have to find the article again and link to it) was to just start writing; don't be concerned with grammatical error or with the perfect sentences or saying everything in the best possible way. Just start writing. Write, write, write. Perfectionism stands in the way of doing just that, however. "Just get started, don't worry about the outcome" is not a tool of the perfectionists trade.

The perfections wants to figure out the best thing to blog on; the best topic to write about. They want to reserve their words for something truly worth expounding upon. Then, when that thing comes to mind, and that moment is there, they want to delicately massage out the words so that they say exactly what they want to say, without there being hardly a trace of potential that someone may misinterpret what they said. Since this is nigh impossible, the perfectionist then is continually frustrated with their efforts–someone misunderstands what they have said, and so the perfectionist internalizes and promises to not make the same mistake the next time. 

The next day, the blog takes a little longer to develop; there is more at stake this time around. The perfectionist has already failed to meet his or her goal once, and they cannot have it happen again.

It doesn't take long for those piles of fails to build up so that beginning to even write at all is perceived as a chore too great to undertake. The outcome can't possibly live up to the hope. And in the face of this flies the advice, "just start writing". Just put something down on paper. Just go for it.

Case in point, I've already edited this very post. Of course there is the occasional deletion of a sentence that failed to formulate in a cohesive manner or the deletion of a word that was tragically misspelled so that even the brain in the computer couldn't decipher what was intended to be said, but this is something different. This is going back and correcting the "to's" and "too's", or the "your" and "you're"'s because you want to make sure that no one might assume that you don't know the difference; the assumption is that no one would have the grace to realize that, since you are just writing, occasionally the signals from your brain to your fingers as you type might get crisscrossed with the unintended consequence being that when your brain says "you're" you type "your". But there is no room for that type of imperfection in the life of the perfectionist.

And then there is the issue of time. The perfectionist wants the perfect moment. The thing that may have stood in the way of me blogging today was the fact that I believed that a more opportune time would present itself, whether because of the pace or schedule of the day or because a topic might arise that inspired me more than the one at hand. Typically the perfectionist waits for that moment, like a surfer passing on 15 good waves for the one wave that blows them away. If a surfer were to do that, I can't help but think that there are many sunny days he would simply be floating in the water, before the sun goes down again, and he goes home having never actually surfed.

So it is with the writer who doesn't capture the moment that he has, right as it comes, as the opportunity to put thoughts to paper unfolds and he takes the chance, no matter how far short of perfect it may be, no matter how imperfect the content or the writing or the whatever-else-might-matter may be, but instead just says, "I'll do it." And he writes.