Did you know that today is never going to happen again?

I woke up today as I normally do, feeling like I got hit by a truck. I slept in another hour, got up, stumbled downstairs, gulped my coffee, made myself some curry, and answered emails during breakfast. I worked for three hours, and then I walked to the coffee shop to work some more. I walked home, ate dinner, and then worked for the next four hours. There was a phone call with a friend somewhere in all of this. In ten minutes, I will go to bed.

As mundane as it all seems, the truth is that this day is now completely, utterly gone, never to repeat itself, and never to exist again.

Every day of my life is like this, I realize. No matter what I do or what I learn or who I see or how I feel, there is that one constant: that the day that happens is unique. It is unique in the sense that it alone is happening, while all other days have either ceased to happen or have not yet begun to happen. Every day is the only day, and the contents of that day belong to that day and that day only.

Reality is exclusive.

Realizing that every day is unique, unprecedented, and unrepeatable is not just some esoteric insight. It is a practical, useful truth.

Since every day is unique, boredom is the result of inattention.

If I find that on any given day I am bored, feeling like every day is exactly the same and that my life is not interesting, all this means is that I have stopped paying attention to my life. It means I have grown comfortable to a fault, numbed to my environment, deeply complacent and dying in a waking sleep. In other words, if it is true that every day is impossibly and irreconcilably unique, then boredom is an illusion.

This also means that boredom is not a problem in itself.

Boredom is a symptom, not an illness. The illness is a chronic inability to recognize the novel beauty in the mundane, a deficiency that necessarily prevents a person from feeling thrilled or pleased or intrigued in more than a shallow sense. We seek endless new experiences to fill the void. The next hit show on Netflix. The next travel destination. Whatever. Something new, that's the answer. Only for a little while...shallow novelty is like caffeine...the spirit builds up a resistance...more and more is needed...until eventually nothing works.

Relieving the symptom of boredom takes renewed, sustained attention.

If you find that your life is boring and unsatisfying, the problem is not your life. It's your attitude.

It is a fact that there is only one day happening at a time.

It is a fact that no two days are identical.

A million tiny things set each day apart from the next. You just have to learn how to spot them. Once you attune yourself to these tiny things, you become fascinated by your own life.

Every day becomes the most interesting day of your life so far.

The Reasoning Behind My Last 5 Posts

I would be lying to you if I said that there was a reason behind everything that I do. I believe I'm not unlike most animals on this planet: driven by unconscious impulse (no matter how reflective I might seem).

I won't get into consciousness here.

But for a good number of the things that I do, there's some underlying thought. And, however small the ratio of thoughtful to thoughtless may be, all of the past 5 blog posts managed to nestle themselves into it. Here's how they did it.

A Letter From the Universe to You

I wrote this letter on my phone while riding the 501 bus from the Financial District in Boston to my home. When I wrote it, I was missing the caffeine high that I had felt during the large part of the previous two days. In all honesty, I wanted to write something that would help me to get back into that bigger, calmer mindset that I tend to take on when I'm feeling on top of the world. If I could take myself to that calm at will, I thought, I would have achieved something highly valuable, maybe a habit I could practice for life.

Often, when I'm feeling sad or hopeless—which is not rare—I will do some positive self-talk. When I do this, I usually talk to myself in the voice of a loving mother or girlfriend (let's not get into how Freudian that is), and I start to tell myself any of the following things:

• It's OK to feel sad.
• I'm here for you.
• I think you did a great job.
• I'm proud of you.
• Just take a big, deep breath.
• I love you.

And that last one, for me, in my most depressed moments, is extremely helpful.

This letter, for me, was a form of positive self-talk. In my journey away from Christianity and through many forms of nihilism, positive self-talk has replaced God and prayer as a means to emotional calm and spiritual centering. Coupled with my belief that (1) there really is only one thing in the universe, and (2) we (who appear to be many different things and people), are all one thing—this letter was my way of talking myself out of a bad mood and reminding myself that there really is nothing to be afraid of in life.

Let me know if you found it helpful—or weird.

Memories from Childhood

I started writing this post just to write something. That might be obvious from the post's lack of structure, but I will admit that this post was just a straight shot from start to finish without any planning or editing.

That said, it developed an intention about halfway through: to tell stories from my childhood, and to reinforce a belief that the stories of my life (even the little ones about watermelon slush) are things that are worth telling. Whether that's true doesn't really matter to me, because the fact that a story is told means that it was worth telling on some level. And if it was worth telling for one person, that's good enough.

The only person who can decide whether your life was a story worth telling is you.

Love your story, embellish the hell out of it, and tell it like the epic it is.

I Can't Watch TV

After writing this post, I realized that it's not really true. That happens from time to time.

(Is anything I say on here true?)

What I don't watch on TV per se I watch in the form of YouTube videos, and the "precious time" I'm saving by avoiding the screen I'm spending (wisely or foolishly, I'm not sure) swiping on Tinder and scrolling through my Facebook feed.

There, that's my #confession for the day.

When I was writing this post, I think I was trying to preserve some sense of being a special snowflake or a reason why I'm different from everyone else my age. We all like to feel special, and I think my snowflake brain wrote this one. Since high school, I've given the snowflakey part of my brain a lot of say in what I say and do. (Whether that's healthy is something I'll figure out along the way, for sure.)

What you can't hear right now is the special snowflake in me squealing in discomfort. It has this small, squeaky voice like the mice from Babe, and it's desperately trying to take itself seriously right now.

It's really great. Wish you could be here to witness it.

Everything Happened Right

I used to feel this kind of ecstasy while worshiping the good lord Jesus Christ. For reasons that may or may not be obvious, I've stopped that sort of thing. However, the feeling of magnificent elation still comes and goes without calling itself the Holy Spirit. Now I feel it when I think of how all the tiny, tiny details of my life fit together in the present moment, and how, despite the moments of hopelessness and despair that have really dragged me down, I found a light at the end of the tunnel.

It's a far cry from Christian doctrine, but I can't help but wonder what Jesus meant when he said that he was the way, the truth, and the life. Which word was emphasized in that sentence?

Maybe it was the "I."

What if, for each of us, the conscious subjective experience—the "I"—is the way, the truth, and the life? What if the answers to all the questions we ever ask ourselves are inside us?

The point behind this post was to explain, in part, the feeling of relief that I feel after going through a long period of questioning and despair. It's to explain the peace that I've found knowing that the meaning of my life is my own creation and mine alone. It's to explain the relief of being free from the old constraints on the meaning of my life—the religiosity and the strict way of thinking of morality.

My Ass Glowing in Spandex, Plus Death

Being content to die is a virtue in my life. Not because life is bad or a burden or anything, but because death is one of the only two known points in our lives. The other point is right here, right now.

My thinking is, if you know where you are and you know where you're going, you can figure out the best route to travel. That route is your life philosophy. That's how simple philosophy is.

For me, I know where I'm going. I'm going to die. Some people are going to heaven to spend eternity with the good lord Jesus Christ, some people are going to the club later this Friday, some people are going to class in about an hour, but for me, it's clear that I'm going to die. (Actually, it's not 100% clear, but it's probably going to happen.) Because I know where I'm going, or I think I do, I can make informed decisions about how to spend my time while I'm alive.

When I wrote this post, I was celebrating one of those times when I felt like I was on the right path, and that, if I died in that moment, I would have felt like my life was complete. Whether other people would agree with that is beside the point.

To quote Roberta Sparrow,

Every living thing dies alone.

If you're going to die happy, you have to be happy being alone. And as I lay on the mat in my yoga class, sweaty and exhausted, I felt pretty happy.

This post

I really wanted to give a solid caption to that picture.

Thanks for taking time out of your day to breathe with me today.

I Can't Watch TV

Since high school I have not been willing or able to watch TV.

There are three big reasons why.

Time.

My time is too important to me. Every minute I spend in front of the screen I feel I have to justify. What did I gain? Was it worth more than an hour, or a half-hour, of my time? Nearly 100 percent of the time, the equation leans toward no.

Escapism.

Second, I view TV as an escape from life. The only reason I personally watch TV is when my own existence is not interesting enough. This happens from time to time; I'll feel uninspired, and I'll go to one of my favorite movies. I choose these movies very carefully so that every single one is likely to leave me feeling refreshed, inspired, and re-awakened. That way, I can stay away from TV for another few months.

Passivity.

Third, I dislike the helplessness and passivity of watching. Every second I spend staring at the screen, I'm absorbing one more second of a world that someone else created. I'm drinking in someone else's values, someone else's product, someone else's imagination. My own thoughts shrink to the background to make way for commercials, capitalist agendas, and talking ponies.

Absorption is for sponges, not human beings.

In a Davidist life, it is important to take a close look at everything you let in.

In the face of every decision, a Davidist has to ask: is this a part of my best life?

Is watching this show going to make me a better person? (Maybe by phasing out my worries, helping me to relax, inspiring me to create something, making me laugh...)

Is this friend helping me to find my best self?

If I ate this food every day for a year, would it help me or hurt me?

Of course, there are many unknowns: people you don't know well, things you've never tried before, places you've never been. For that reason, Davidism takes a lot of experimentation...trial and error. But through that experimentation, you gain a better understanding of what helps you and what hurts you, and you can move closer and closer to living the best day of your life, every day, with the resources you have.

Learn more about Davidism.